Server Virtualization

[luke.mccormick]

just wondering how many of us actually use Virtualization software. I find it a huge convenience, especially now that vmware server and ms virtual server are free.

[Lost Soul]

well i use vmware

[Zxian]

VMware Workstation is what I use primarily. I've been wanting to play with VMware server though. I can think of lots of applications where I'd like to have multiple OSes on the server at once...

[CoffeeFiend]

I couldn't live w/o VMWare Server (looks like I'm the only one who voted for that, eh). Price is right too.

[luke.mccormick]

cool, Well I use Vmware server, because it's free and i don't like having my VM's hog my local system's resources.

[#rootworm]

i've always used vmware, it's superior under most circumstances...but yesterday i actually found microsoft's VPC to be more compatible in a couple instances where things weren't working for me in vmware.

so now i guess i'll be using both. (i'll use both because vmware is still at least 50% faster for me, even when i give VPC more ram than vmware)

[LLXX]

Where's the... All of the Above?

Has anyone tried running one VM software inside another? That would be the real test of virtualisation - if it can truely imitate the real hardware.

[jondercik]

Had to choose Vmware Server because the correct option, VMWare ESX server wasnt listed. Currently have about 200 virtual servers running in the infrastructure.

[nitroshift]

I chose none as it's easier (don't ask why) for me to ghost the OS partition and then install whatever on REAL hardware.

[BlkCrowe]

Virtualization? Heck yes!

I have VMWare ESX 2.53 on 2 x HP 585 Quad-Opteron servers with 32GB RAM and am running 80 VMs between these 2 servers and neither one of them has hit 50% CPU utilization (with all 80 VMs powered up). With Virtual Center, I can "V-Motion" VMs between the 2 servers without ever taking the VM off-line. I'm getting ready to add a 3rd server to my farm and should easily get 120-150 VMs on these servers. I can't wait to get ESX 3.0 installed so that I can take advantage of some of the new High Availabilty and Resource Management features.

As for the workstation, I use both VMWare Workstation and Microsoft Virtual PC. While VMWare is by far more powerful than Virtual PC, I usually only neeed the basic functionality that Virtual PC provides. I'm not virtualizing Active Directory or client server applications, so I don't want the overhead that comes with VMWare. In my experience Virtual PC has a smaller footprint and is easier to use for most inexperienced virtual software users.

Let me use an "SAT Test" example to describe the 3...

Microsoft Virtual PC is to VMWare Workstation as Notepad is to Wordpad

VMWare Workstation is to VMWare ESX Server as Wordpad is to Microsoft Word

Or for you *NIX guys out there...as Wordpad is to Vi. :-)

[luke.mccormick]

sweet. I'm using the free Vmware server in my home environment and i love it...much more convenient than running workstation or VPC

I guess i should've put ESX in the choices list but i wasnt thinking. I wish i had a good enough system to run 3 or 4 vms at once..but i don't have cash for a new server.

[StateS]

I'm not virtualizing Active Directory or client server applications, so I don't want the overhead that comes with VMWare. In my experience Virtual PC has a smaller footprint and is easier to use for most inexperienced virtual software users.

You could always use Qemu, with the KQemu acclerator which is open source and leaves even less footprints than Virtual PC. And if you don't like using command line tools you could always use QemuManager, which is a great windows frontend for Qemu. But anyway besides Qemu I also use the VMware player (along with VMmanager to generate the needed files to get started with the installation of a virtual machine in VMware player ) just to compare one with the other.

Plus Qemu supports not just the x86 architecture but the x86_64, ARM, SPARC, SPARC64, PowerPC, PowerPC64, MIPS, m68k, and SH-4 each up to a certain extent of course.

You can find the homepage for Qemu here: http://www.qemu.com/

And for those of you who would like to try it out with the frontend: http://www.davereyn.co.uk/download.htm (I suggest downloading the complete package from there, the one that includes the frontend, qemu and the kqemu accelerator support)

Oh and don't forget to download and install the KQemu accelerator from the Qemu website.

And here is another site which will be helpful for ya: http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~qemu-win/

This site has updates for the windows version of qemu. Twords the end of the page they have a version of Qemu compiled for windows with numerous amounts of patches applied to fix and even give new functions to qemu.

Cheers!

[newsposter]

the concept of 'REAL' hardware is passe. It's been years since any user process or OS load was able to effectively use more than 25% of a processors capabilities. The real bottleneck is and always has been disk i/o.

[awergh]

what about the windows version of KQemu acclerator

[CoffeeFiend]

Last I tried QEMU it was very SLOW (compared to VMWare). Drivers (for the emulated hardware running in the client OSes) weren't as nice either. Lots of little things. And with the other free virtualization products nowadays (vmware server and player), and other affordable options (e.g. parallels workstation for 50$), I just see no need for it - I'd rather pay for a commercial product than using QEMU if I had to.

ESX and VirtualCenter are very nice if you have lots of monster servers with infiniband, an iSCSI SAN and all. But that nice hardware plus the software (thousands of $ per server) is just too expensive for most users (for those, there's GSX - reincarnated in a free app that's very good too). Either ways, it's totally overkill for my needs.

No mentions of Parallels Workstation or Xen yet? (nor Cygwin or MinGW either?)