VMWare Rolls Out Their Largest Product Release

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."

Re:VMWare Server 1.0 same as VMWare Workstation 5.

[Keaster]

It was thier GSX server product rebranded.

WORD

Excellent support of late

[pdbaby]

We've started to use more and more virtualisation systems at work -- the vmware solution is by far the most sophisticated and performant we've encountered - and the upgrade path to ESX server is always handy. Clusters are a virtual (a-ha!) doddle to work with once you pretty much virtualise everything (and the performance isn't bad either!).

Roll on more vmware products to make my life a happier one!

You're right, you don't. Stop thinking 1 box.

[CFD339]

So, first the obvious stuff you know. It may have no value to you, but for doing live demos and development environments its sweet.

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?

Parallels and VTx

[Anonymous Coward]

Is VMWare shipping with VTx support yet, like Parallels.com? I've got WinXP, Linux and OpenBSD running under Parallels, and the performance seems far superior to VMWare.

Re:Disagree about Over-allocation of CPUs

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use dual CPU if the applications support it and you may see an improvement. Think about it though, if you actually have a dual CPU machine, the single CPU you assign to the guest OS sees one CPU but it can be either of the physical CPUs when it needs a CPU (when can assign a specific CPU or just any single CPU which will be either CPU that is currently available for the guest OS). Assigning 2 CPUs to the guest OS is fine as well but when the guest OS or the application running on the guest OS requires a response from both CPUs or a specific CPU, it has to wait for that CPUs to respond instead of getting cycles from whatever CPU is available. If one of those CPUs is loaded, that wait will not be balanced and your application can suffer. A single CPU at 10% can process more by itself when it is not waiting for the second CPU that may be at 70% if they are requested in parallel by the application running in dual CPU mode. The VM instructor I had explained it a lot better then I can but it made sense to me at the time. Dual CPU *CAN* be an improvement for specific applications but you have to assess the entire ESX environment and all guest OSs running on that ESX server before assuming dual CPU is better then assigning any single CPU. Basically, there is no standard to determine which is better, you have to test it for yourself in your environment.

Benchmarks you've seen

[TimMann]

Since our EULA didn't allow benchmarks to be published, most likely the only benchmarks you've seen are some that the Xen folks did for their SOSP paper, taken on a version of VMware Workstation from several years ago before the EULA was changed to forbid publishing benchmarks.

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.]

Re:Benchmarks you've seen

[Bigmilt8]

You are correct. VMWare does not allow it's products' benchmarks to be published. This is probably the most dishonest thing I've seen. They claim it's better but you have to take their word for it. That's a laugh. I am a Database Administrator and I fought the battle with the Systems Administrators over using VMWare. I had used it before in a previous job and it wasn't ready for the datacenter. My assessment is that it is still not ready for the datacenter. The performance is not up to par and I dare VMWare to prove that it is by allowing a 3rd party to benchmark it against native.