July 8, 2021 . 1 MIN READ
I would say “go with PV” (on Linux) unless you have a reason. PV has been much better tested because it was the only option for many years. (HVM for Linux was only recently introduced outside of the very special Compute Cluster nodes.)
Converting between them isn’t very hard — especially if you do it right. By “do it right”, I mean using something like Chef or Puppet or Ansible to build your server. This lets you put your “server” (well, server build process) under version control, which creates instant documentation for everyone to understand what’s on your server.
Your root drive should be ephemeral, so that if the server dies, you can just re-launch and re-attach your EBS data. (And you can quickly upgrade the OS or server software by launching a 2nd instance to play with.) If you have an EBS root drive, you’ll have to pay to store/backup your OS, and you’ll never know if your server config is checked into version control or not.
UPDATE: Going forward, I would lean toward HVM, since performance can be much better (i.e. “Enhanced Networking”). Also, it’s not “brand-new” anymore.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22130214/amazon-ec2-ubuntupv-or-ubuntuhvm
https://www.opswat.com/blog/aws-2015-why-you-need-switch-pv-hvm
