I've been trying to set up a pair of servers utilising KVM on Ubuntu 9.10 to host 8 virtual machines between them and ended up with various issues from the VMs freezing, to not powering on.

I had one virtual server set up and running and was setting up a second, when any operation involving OpenSSL would cause the VM to lock up in a weird way - all network traffic would cease, it wouldn't process logins on the console, but it wasn't taking any CPU time off the host. The first virtual server was identical and worked perfectly.

Another VM I tried to setup had installed Ubuntu fine then refused to reboot, throwing kernel exceptions to do with XFS.

I've now installed Citrix XenServer 5.5 on both hosts, and am now setting up my third VM with absolutely no issues. I also had the same experience when I tried VMware, but I preferred Xen as it appears to give more features on the free license.

My question is am I just unlucky with KVM, or is KVM as unstable as it appears? Are you using, or planning on using, KVM in production, and how successful have you been?