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VMWare Rolls Out Their Largest Product Release
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Monday June 05, @09:27PM
from the virutally-a-full-blown-release dept.
from the virutally-a-full-blown-release dept.
opieum writes "VMware has launched Virtual Infrastructure 3.0 today which includes ESX 3.0 and a number of management utilities." Relatedly Jane Walker writes "SearchOpenSource has two authors that try to show why VMware ESX Server is miles ahead of Xen and Virtual Server. Discover what to watch out for when running ESX Server and how to avoid sprawl in your virtual data center."
VMWare Rolls Out Their Largest Product Release
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Slashdot Rolls Out...
(Score:5, Funny)Re: So?
(Score:5, Insightful)VMWare Server 1.0 same as VMWare Workstation 5.x?
(Score:2, Informative)(http://www.cookeville.com/ruckc)
Re:VMWare Server 1.0 same as VMWare Workstation 5.
(Score:5, Informative)(http://www.chipx86.com/)
(Also, this blog entry [chipx86.com] might help with a few common misconceptions)
VMware Server, while similar in appearance and sharing much of the same functionality as Workstation, is a completely different product with a different use case and target audience. It is the successor to GSX, and is for people who want to set up, well, servers! The key feature that Server has that Workstation does not is remoting, where you run a server on a computer and connect to it from a separate computer via a remote console or web interface. The VMs can start up with the computer, shut down with it, and can be accessed by multiple users. The VMs also don't require an X installation to run the VMs, nor does it require any sort of UI to be running for the VM to run.
Workstation has a number of features that Server does not have. Among other differences, it supports multiple snapshots, teams of VMs (where multiple VMs can start up/shutdown together, can be in their own special network with custom NIC speeds and packet loss), and 3D acceleration in the guest (currently experimental, and requires DirectX in the guest for now). We have a lot in the works for the product, and the gap will widen.
The one difference that people seem to for some reason get upset over is the price. Workstation costs $189, while Server is free. People have asked me why they should get Workstation if Server is free. The answer is that you should get Workstation if it has the features you want. If Server is better suited to your requirements or budget, go ahead and get that. We're not trying to force you into buying Workstation, and we're in no way crippling the VMs. A VM made in Server should work in Workstation and Player just fine. Likewise, a VM made in Workstation should work in Server or Player.
Workstation is not somehow "better" than Server just because it costs more. It's a different product. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses. Yes, Server is free while Workstation is not, and part of this is because that's where mid-level server virtualization products were heading. Microsoft was considerably lowering the price on Virtual Server in an effort to hurt GSX sales. Xen, while not a huge contender in the enterprise yet, is free and good work is being done on it. Workstation, however, is unique enough in its dev/test features and still has value that we and our customers still feel is worth something. And you'll see that value continue to grow over time, just as you will with our other products.
I hope that helped you understand why we're still charging for Workstation while Server is free. Choose whichever product you like: Player, Server, Workstation, ACE, ESX.. They're all fine choices, and they all offer solutions to different problems. It's not just about virtualization itself anymore. It's about what you can build on top of it.
(Opinions expressed here are my own and are not necessarily representative of VMware, yada yada.)
Excellent support of late
(Score:5, Interesting)Roll on more vmware products to make my life a happier one!
I want to crap my pants!
(Score:5, Informative)(http://www.keaster.com/)
XVM
(Score:2)(http://www.xalien.com)
Replaced 2 old servers with notebook and VMWare
(Score:5, Informative)Now I know what you all are saying, but the X31 works great, and is plenty beefy for the 2 servers it is replacing (a Pentium III 500mhz and an AMD 1ghz). The great thing about it is, it is absolutely quiet, it has its own 12" screen, keyboard and mouse (track-pad), and it has a built in UPS system. I have it hooked up the the same UPS that was running the other 2 servers, so if the power goes out, this thing will probably run a week without power.
The SATA external drive is fast, so that isn't an issue, and since it is external I place the drive away from the computer and sight for safety.
VMWare Server is great, and I really appreciate the price (free). I'm currently using Virtual PC for my workstation virtualization (testing, different environments during development, etc), but since I'm so happy with VMWare Server, I'll be switching over to VMWare workstation on my next upgrade. If a client ever needs serious virtualization I'll recommend they give ESX server a try. I think VMWare giving away their basic server is a smart move for them.
The really nice thing about converting my physical servers to virtual ones is how portable they are now. I literally can suspend my 2 servers, disconnect my external SATA drive, move it to a beefy machine, connect it, and resume the 2 servers on the faster machine; that's slick.
VMware player for Skype only?
(Score:1)Right now I plan to create an entire Windows XP virtual machine just for this - is there a way to create a machine which can run only Skype and reduce memory requirements by this? My hunch says "no" but I always have a feeling I'm missing something when it comes to tracking the VMware product lines.
Disagree about Over-allocation of CPUs
(Score:2)For example, doing something like running a DB Recouncilation with a single CPU box, will completely annilihate user interactivity unless you have two cpus. So his example of a reporter box that runs once a week not needing two CPUs... sure it doesn't need two CPUs.. unless you decide you want to do something else on the box while its running the report. Or let's say the report consists of two processes working in parallel.. they should run in parallel on a multiple CPU box and complete much, much faster. I've actually noticed in these types of scenarios it can be more than 2x improvement since you're getting more cache hits and much less context switching.
for those that don't know
(Score:1, Informative)(Former VMWare employee, posting anonymously).
VMWare ahead of Xen eh?
(Score:1, Flamebait)(http://www.mrmagoo.org/ | Last Journal: Thursday May 16, @12:11AM)
Benchmarks you've seen
(Score:5, Interesting)(http://tim-mann.org/)
I understand that recently we changed the EULA back to allow benchmarking again. Let's see if the Xen folks redo their benchmarks or keep making hay by comparing with the old VMware Workstation 3.1 benchmarks...
[Standard disclaimer: I work for VMware, but I'm not speaking officially.]
Mac?
(Score:2)I wouldn't say miles Oglesby and Herold.
(Score:2)Management
Sure, the VMWare servers had nice pretty management tools that were probably a couple hundred yards ahead of Xen's CLI tools, but this company doesn't exactly tolerate idiots. The unix guys here are more than capbable of migrating to Xen, compiled from source with a customized kernel, with no problem. The command line configuration and live migration utilities are more than adequate considering we already have SSH access to the boxes in the back. There was no need to change the firewall configs to allow us VMWare console access or anything.
Performance
I ran series of benchmarks for the following applications: MySQL, Apache, Lighttpd, perl and php. All of the bechmarks were ran on the same hardware, I just re-imaged the two machines multiple times. Xen won in every race. As a matter of fact, on the dual core Opeteron SunFire the Xen vm was a whopping 600 seconds ahead of the VMWare vm at running MySQL's sql-bench suite.
Stability
Xen 3.0 is more stable, IMHO than VMWare. Though neither platform crashed or hosed, the ESX box had a lot of trouble keeping time via ntp and had some problems with disk I/O.
Distrust
I reported the time problem several times to the VMWare techs assigned to our case, and they assured me that it was a host os issue. Funny that this article mentions that ESX < 3 has a problem keeping time with a 2.6 kernel isn't it?
Future
Later this week I'll be recieving the first Intel VT enabled server we purchased. I'll soon see if any OS or any kernel (including GRSec [grsecurity.org] patched) kernels can be booted under Xen. If that is case, my company is likely is to purchase XenSource's commercial products.
Time
(Score:2)(Last Journal: Saturday May 01, @04:54PM)
About time.
I have only one ESX server, it has only been down twice when I upgraded the host. but the system time in the guest OS is a bitch when the guest OS is Linux. Never did get it to work. not even with xntpd installed. Now it has only been test systems so I can live with having to run a ntpdate from a cron because it is 7 minutes slow every hour.
I had another strange issue, I have 2 w2k3 servers, 3 SuSE SLES 9, and some other stuff running.
But I once had a virtual disk failure on a SuSE server that looked just like a real disk failure(timeouts etc). strange when it is just a file on a raid disk. their site had no information that could help me with the errorcode, nor did their forums. It wasn't a big deal(test system) but for the "fun" of it I spent a day trying to figure out how to salvage a virtual server having a virtual disk crash. Didn't find any satisfying solutions, so I ended up installing a new server(copy virtual disk image) and being able to mount a copy of the "crashed" disk and I could then copy all the data over without errors.
Gave me a bit of hesitation for using it for real, I do not need virtual disk crashes to make my job interesting.
Scott Herold's comment misleading
(Score:2)http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/ [cam.ac.uk]
A port of Windows XP was developed for an earlier version of Xen, but is not available for release due to licence restrictions.
If that is not a slander, i don't know what is. Perhaps Herold mispoke, I don't know. However going by the context and the purpose of the article, a cozy little place may be waiting for him in a marketing department.
Progress / money ratio
(Score:1, Insightful)Re:Xen
(Score:1)Re:I just don't see it.
(Score:4, Informative)(http://www.megacity.org/)
Re:I just don't see it.
(Score:5, Funny)(http://www.dimcap.net/)
I've been working in IT for just under ten years now and I hate every vendor out there. They all suck and none of their products work worth a crap. I'm sick of wasting my time chasing bugs and applying endless patches as new issues surface. However, VMWare is the one shining light in my shop. It does exactly what they say it does and it does it flawlessly. Every feature is as you would expect and (ESX) host servers stay up for months at a time. Never have we had to reboot a host to solve a stability issue. It just freakin' works. After you've fought so many other products for years, seeing VMWare software in action is enough to make you cry.
You're right, you don't. Stop thinking 1 box.
(Score:5, Interesting)(http://www.thenorth.com/apblog | Last Journal: Monday February 13, @08:48AM)
vmware workstation - for $$ you get an amazing desktop virtualization environment perfect for people who write drivers and core operating system software. Snapshots and things, complete control over memory, "frozen in state" debugging from outside the vm.
vmware server - free. On the desktop, it lets you run more than one pc at a time. Also can run on a server -- even headless. It can start with the operating system and automatically load the vm's at boot time. A conside side app lets you manage your headless server platform remotely.
Then you get into their Data Center environment.
Don't think 1 machine. Thinking 10 machines. You deploy your vm's across them, using your EMC storage arrays. You don't even have to know which hardware is running your vm. They can be moved around at will. Add a machine to the pack and you increase overall power. A machine goes down? So what? Migrate the vm. The VM's all run with the same "drivers" which are virtual.
Have you ever kept a server longer than you wanted because you didn't want to deal with reinstalling an entire operating system and all the software just to take advantage of the new hardware?
Re:I just don't see it.
(Score:2)If you weren't virtualizing, how could you afford those five servers if you can't afford two (albeit beefier) servers for a primary and backup of the virtualized server?
And if you run those servers on one machine as services instead of VMs, then you're in the same boat; if the MB fries all five services go down.
Re:I just don't see it. - step back and look again
(Score:5, Informative)1) Upgrading / retiring a server? Set up the new box, install VMWare, shut down VM on old server, copy files, bring VM up on new server - it never will know the difference (and this is without a SAN!) Got a SAN - VMotion the VM to a new server -0- (zero) downtime.
2) Custom app you only want to setup one and forget it! Great Plains, vendor platforms, your monitoring and cacti box. Set it up in a VM and let it live. You're never going to reinstall the box, so why put it on a box you may have to reinstall
3) Backups of a physical server suck. Think, with the box running, you can snap a fully functional complete disk image and move it offsite via nfs, cifs, ftp. If there is ever an issue, you roll back to that snap shot and it's just as if the server had a bad shutdown. No bare metal recovery that takes hours and hours. We're talking minutes (in a SAN enviroment).
4) Need a server to test something - create it! Setup anything you want in a VM - it doesn't care. Don't like it? Delete it! Need more power? Move it! Take it home with you for the weekend? Install player on your laptop and take the files with you!
5) Big hardware is better hardware. Running an enterprise on comsumer gear with a special sticker on the front is just bad. Enterprise grade servers are beaten into submission and have the best possible components. Dell has been known to hault production of a platform if a vendor's component fails during testing (the PE 4400's had this issue ~4 years ago). Using VMWare you can buy 2-3 big servers, rather than the 5-10 pc servers. Get 8-16gb of RAM per system. Get larger hard drives, and not waste so much space.
6) Isolate those apps. Sometimes its just better to let each application server have it's own OS instance. That way if you ever need to, you can replace them without having to worry that some interdependancy on the box will cause failures.
7) Its good to be green - think of the power savings when your entire enterprise is running on 1/10th the hardware. Using a performance SAN and a bunch of DL585's I can't think of a company under 10,000 people who can't run off of 1 racks worth of servers. Think about it - thousands of users, 100 server, in one rack. I have clients that are in the 50-100 user range running on 2 DL385's or PE2850's.
Re:I just don't see it.
(Score:2)It only makes sense if you have - or expect to have - requirements for a large and/or dynamic number of machines.
For example, if you have 10 different production machines, for 10 distinct tasks, but want to provide redundancy for them (in the form of standby machines) then you could either go out and buy ten additional machines, or you could buy 1 - 3 machines and have the ten standby servers as VMs (the chances of more than a single primary machine failing simultaneously is pretty rare, multiple simultaneous failures even more so).
Another example might be where load varies throughout the day to different areas of your infrastructure - so instead of always having to have the physical machines to cope with your peak load, you can take additional VMs on and offline as needed to cope with varying load.
A third example is where you want to have a good, scalable, partitioned architecture from the start (eg: by separating functions out into independent machines) but don't have a suitable hardware budget (or current requirements) to justify it. By using VMs, you can create your multi-machine architecture on a single physical machine and the subsequent migration to multiple physical machines (as requirements increase and/or budget allows) becomes relatively trivial.
Finally, there are situations where physical rack space is extremely limited, but you still want to have multiple "machines". Since you can fit a lot of power into only a few RUs these days, it could be quite feasible to have a couple of multicore 2U servers running a dozen VMs only taking up 4U, rather than a dozen real machines taking up 12U (or a blade chassis taking up ~7U).
With all that said, the incredibly low (and dropping) cost of relatively powerful servers has, IMHO, put a serious dent in the usefulness of VMs in production environments.
Re:Xen
(Score:3, Funny)Re:Xen
(Score:2)(http://rimuhosting.com/)
Xen's performance overhead is about 3-4% of the CPU. So sure things could be improved. But even if VMWare had no overhead (which it probably does) the performance difference is not something you'd really notice unless doing technical benchmarks.
In our hosting setup we have found that Xen is reliable, performs well, and the VPSs are about as functionaly identical as a 'real' dedicated server as you can get.
If your needs happen to be running Linux virtual machines and you're comfortable with the Xen tools then Xen is a great product. Glad to hear VMWare is also improving their products. Competition = good.
--
Xen-based Linux hosting and proud of it [rimuhosting.com]
Re:I just don't see it.
(Score:1)