I got the opportunity to play with EVE-NG last week. Luckily this was running on a DL360G7 – just as my ESX 6.0 Server so I can compare both of them very well 🙂
Getting EVE-NG to run was pretty easy – I downloaded the “bare metal” iso, installed it on the Server and it was ready to go.
I installed a fresh ESX 6.0u3 on the other Lab-Server to make sure, that both of them are fresh installed.
I created 6 vSRX and 2 vMX – the vQFX was not part of this Setup.
First Test – boot-time:
ESX 6.0 took about 1 minute from the moment I pressed the power button to the login screen – pretty solid.
EVE-NG needed about 30 seconds – damn that thing was fast 🙂 Thanks to the Ubuntu 16.04 EVE-NG starts up very fast.
Second Test – boot the whole lab at once (powering up all 10 Machines):
ESX 6.0 took about 10 minutes until every VM was powered up and had the login prompt. All Devices were blazingly fast after booting.
EVE-NG took about 30 minutes until I could login to each VM – however the VM’s were practically useless, since the login itself took about 5mins. After 2 more hours all Devices reacted somehow fast – but slow compared to ESX. I searched the Forums but couldn’t find out why.
Third Test – the Resources:
ESX 6.0 needed around 40G of RAM and around 50% of all usable 16 CPU-Cores.
EVE-NG needed around 70G of RAM (don’t ask me why) and needed almost 100% of all CPU Cores.
Fourth Test – access:
ESX needs the Web-Client or the ESX-Windows-Client.
The Windows-Client is not installed on every PC – so “Lab-Everywhere” is not possible. The Web-Client is an Option.
EVE-NG comes with a HTML5 Web-Client – easy to access from everywhere – also EVE shows a Visio-like Lab-Topology with drag and drop – this is a huge plus compared to ESX.
All in all I will stick to the ESX-Server because of multiple reasons:
+ ESX itself runs very smooth and is well known by me (compared to KVM)
+ The Resources were way too much on the EVE-NG (I could run about twice as much Devices for the same resources)
+ ESX needs less time to power up the whole Lab. My Lab runs mostly on Fridays. So I power my Server down after labbing – I don’t like the idea of powering it up at Thursday evening just to waste my money (Power-Bill) to be able to lab on friday – that feels wrong…
Of course there are still ways to tweak both Hypervisors – a tweaked ESX runs all the Test-Devices at about 10% CPU – I can’t tell what a KVM will do.
Hopefully this gives you a small overview of both Systems
Hello,
Very good comparison.
We’ll definitely take a look in ways to improve that.
Thanks
EVE-NG Team
I was just going to test this, but I’ll probably stick to ESX. Thanks for testing it.
What are the specs on your lab server?
This one was an old DL360G7 with 2 Quad Core CPU’s @ 2.6GhZ as far as I remember and 96GB of RAM.
Hi,
Can u explain when u said “a tweaked ESX runs all the Test-Devices at about 10% CPU”
Thanks
Sure. WIth tweaked ESX I mean the HP’ized ESX install so that the ESX itself can access all of the special HP Drivers to boot the performance to a maximum. This changed a lot lately – so when comparing it to the servers nowadays, ESX (and also HP-ESX) don’t offer the same performance as EVE-NG. The Products evolved and the outcome completely changed 🙂
BR
Chris
Hi,
Your blog is simply fantastic! Awesome work.
Do you know how where I can buy a DL360G7 Server and where, please? Amazon?
thanks.
The best source for the used Servers is usually ebay. A lot of Employees sell equipment from Companies there and usually, you can fetch them relatively cheap
Good read! I also like my Labs on ESX. Although I run an EVE-NG instance on my ESX. For the most part I use the ESX for lobbing do to performance on the actual VMs itself. However, I do like using EVE-NG for quick setups. It’s a lot easier to test different labs in EVE-NG then it is to spin up a lab on ESX.