Re:Currently on the move! (Score 1)

Hi Theres, After having rolled out a 60+ CPU Production VMWARE-ESX implementation for my organisation, I can elaborate. VMWARE are currently pushing the virtualization much further than any other vendor, open source or commercial. When you buy into VMWARE (yes point#1, it ain't free) you are buying into a very scalable and open environment with good compatibility of guest operating systems. Point #2, The fact that we can have multiple physical servers in our Virtual Center farm accessing shared storage means that we care less about the hardware and more about the resources. Using the shared storage model (which is fundamental to VMWARE Virtual Center/ESX environments) we can very quickly and easily transport our virtual machines around. Point #3, Vmotion is the killer feature for ESX. We can also change physical hosts on-the-fly without downtime of the virtual machine. We have moved many VMs with hundreds of connected users who don't even notice. This makes maintenance of the underlying virtualization layer tranparent to the virtual machines. (the utilities). Point #4, With Virtual Center we can very quickly provision new virtual machines from our library of ready mades, which fully integrates with industry standard post installation customization wizards. (like Microsoft Sysprep). This has made us more agile as a business, as we are more quickly able to respond to new business ICT requirements. This is our eggshell utility model. When the future versions of Virtual Center arrive, they'll give us resource pooling, dynamic failover and resource scheduling, and greater overall control over resources. What VMWARE-ESX doesn't at the moment offer in terms of paravirtualization, may be superceded by on-chip virtualization such as Intel-VT and AMD Pacifica. VMWARE advocate? Maybe, but I'm remaining open minded to new technologies but quietly aware that for the time being, they won't integrate with VMWARE. Also for now our consolidation efforts are in the windows and unix small systems area. We haven't had the needs to warrant a major project virtualizing all of our Linux, or all of our Solaris. The best bit, ESX saves our team countless hours supporting hundreds of vms. Maybe one day the open standards will evolve to the point where other products will plugin to each other. Given that VMWARE are pushing the industry ahead with open virtualization standards. VMWARE Standards & Hypercall Interface http://www.vmware.com/standards/ http://www.vmware.com/communitysource/faqs.html