Virtualization Goes Mainstream 167
InformationWeek is reporting that, during the same week that Microsoft announced the free price for Virtual PC, VMWare 1.0 was released for free as well. Though there were already many free options for virtualization available, these major products signal a shift in the industry. From the article: "There are many ramifications here. Obviously, the slew of products means network managers can now adopt virtual servers into their overall strategies and don't have acquisition costs providing a justification to avoid it. Other than the very-high-end VMware ESX and the midline Microsoft Virtual Server on mainstream XP platforms, virtualization is essentially free wherever you might want to use it."
Re:VM Fabric (Score:3, Informative)
Re:right... (Score:4, Informative)
Not necessarily. from the
"Customers who deploy Windows Vista Enterprise have the ability to install up to four (4) copies of the operating system in a virtual machine for a single user on a single device."
Re:VM Fabric (Score:5, Informative)
When you hit a user-defined treshold for either memory or CPU on a VM, then DRS will trigger a VMotion of that particular VM to another ESX in the cluster without user intervention, effectively running the VM where it can run the best, based on the SLA you defined when you created it.
The cool thing about this is that you can now have a predictable cluster utilization level, regardless of where the VMs are running.
[Disclaimer: I work for VMware]
qemu (Score:3, Informative)
Mac OS as host OS? Oh, please. Why not Amiga OS?
For OSX as a host and guest there is a solution: > http://www.kberg.ch/qemu/ [kberg.ch]
A good replacement for laptops (Score:3, Informative)
External HDDs also work well, but they won't fit inside a shirt pocket.
Re:I hope ESX is a cash cow (Score:2, Informative)
Looking at Microsoft's features page:
http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/Li
And VMWare's features page:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/esx/#_tabfeatur
Currently VMware has these edges in the virtual machine features:
*SMP support (looks though like Microsoft may offer this in the next beta after the current beta)
*Clustering of the hosts, not just the virtual machines
*Backup consolidation - imagine being able to backup 40+ windows boxes with only one backup client at the file level (not just the virtual machine images), even if the windows virtual machines are powered off. This saves on having to load backup agents on each virtual, and saves a load of cpu horsepower.
*64 bit support
*Multiple virtual machine clustering with a shared disk
*Live migration between physical hosts - imagine moving a SQL virtual server, as it is being used, to another physical box. Doing a hardware upgrade on the prior physical box, then migrating back. Users don't notice a thing.
*Direct SAN support
*Multipathing for network traffic or to the shared storage
There are probably other ones that I didn't mention, but those are the ones that count for me. VMware knows Microsoft isn't going to sit idle and will probably be adding more on top of that. Same goes for Microsoft, but they have a lot of catching up to do.
Re:It's free... At least now. (Score:3, Informative)
I like to think of virtualization as 3 different sets of solutions: 1) for optimizing server performance vs. cost; 2) a "nice to have" kind of thing for development workstations 3) a tool to ease the transition between MS Windows and Linux
In the server optimization field, Microsoft may follow whatever trend they need to, in this case damaging a bit of the relationship they have with hardware vendors, as it's possible to do MSWindows-related tasks with less hardware than before. VMware and Microsoft solutions will be picked in different cases depending on how good they perform. MS gets to sell their other software as they always do, regardless of their clients using theirs or VMware virtualization solutions.
In the case of desktops, Microsoft may have much more to lose: Let's say you have a lot of workstations with legal copies of MS Windows and little incentive to upgrade to Windows XP or Vista. If you decide to do a round of hardware upgrades on your desktops, you can use VMware to stop the expense of automatically updating to Windows XP/Vista/Whatever:
- backup "My documents" of all machines involved;
- install Ubuntu Linux on all the new workstations;
- install vmware workstation
- reinstall MS Windows inside the virtual machine
- backup the "clean install" you just did of Microsoft Windows
- Move all the "my Documents" folders to some file server
- Keep VMware running on one of the virtual desktops, so that the user can go back to its familiar environment and some old school windows app they really need - bonus points for having 2 LCD screens per computer, one with Gnome Desktop, another for virtualized Windows
The final step is to make your maniacal laugh be well heard on the day that your version of MS Windows is discontinued, and you still use it as happily as the day you started - you just broke the forced upgrade cycle.VMware server (Score:3, Informative)
MS Virtual Server 2005 *is* free (Score:4, Informative)
So the real comparison with the new "free" VMWare should be against VS 2005, and not against Virtual PC which is just a desktop emulation app.
Not saying one is better than the other -- just compare the same type of fruit when making your own decisions. The article is badly written or it's writer didn't understand what he was writing about.
Re:The only discussion missing.. (Score:5, Informative)
In the hosted world, the host OS is providing memory management and scheduling, as well as access to its device drivers. In the bare metal architecture, the hypervisor itself provides those functions, making it way more efficient. Recently, a customer was telling me he was running 6 VMs using GSX (now VMware Server) on a 2-way dual-core Opteron box. He installed ESX and he was then running 20 VMs on the same machine. That gives you an idea of the difference on these two approaches from the performance perspective.
The other reason why your performance may vary, is because you have CPU, memory and I/O overhead also. In the CPU realm, the vmkernel is running on ring 0, and the guest OS is relegated to ring 1 in the x86 CPU. The problem is that not all assembly instructions can be executed successfully in ring 1, so VMware's Binary Translator module will actually detect those patterns of "dirty" assembly instructions and will insert traps so every time you hit one of those, it gets executed by the vmkernel on behalf of that VM. So, the more traps you need to do, the more CPU overhead you get.
Additionally to the CPU overhead, you have memory mapping overhead (i.e. no real DMA), I/O subsystem overhead, etc.
Numbers can vary a lot. In general, large companies consider an average of 15% of virtualization tax, which is realistic when you want to run a large number of VMs in multiple systems. In any case, the best approach is to always test your workload before you put it in a sensitive environment.
[Disclaimer: I work for VMware]
Re:VM Fabric (Score:2, Informative)
As it is copying, the virtual machine is still running. Changes that are made in the virtual machine's memory are kept track of and sent back over the wire. When the memory is fully copied, it snapshots the cpu and temporarily pauses the virtual machine. During that pause, it sends the cpu state over the network then the other physical host unpauses the virtual machine and sends out a mac broadcast so the network switches realize where the virtual machine is. That cpu snapshot period is about 1-2 seconds.
If the network can't keep up with the memory copy and delta change copies, it will never be flopped over to the other physical host.
What I would like to see in future versions of ESX is for it to also be able to migrate the virtual disks. That would need more network traffic though, but would be really good for DR. In the meantime though I am content with pausing virtual machines, then copying that paused state over the WAN link for DR. Other possible solutions if you can't pause machines would be to look at SAN replication over the WAN, such as with Xiotech's georep. Then on the other end of the SAN replication have the systems ready to go to bring the virtual machines online.
Re:VM Fabric (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Xen... (Score:3, Informative)
I've been running it on my Linux box for a while now and it works very well--it even supports the Intel VT acceleration built into the new Intel chips (like on my Pentium D) unlike VMware.