Posted by Fraser Campbell
Fri, 03 Feb 2006 03:13:00 GMT
Some very interesting news tonight, VMWare GSX server is being made available for free. Is this a response to Xen? No, no, no according to “a vice president” over at VMWare. Quoting The Register:
Raghuram downplayed VMware Server as a response to Xen.
“Xen is only for serious, bleeding-edge Linux enthusiasts,” he said. “You have to live with a highly unstable open source product that’s of little interest to the average system administrator.”
Comical stuff!
Hypervisors are now free (Xen), by now everyone understands that the hypervisor is a commodity.
Hypervisor functionality is likely to be bundled into all server hardware within the next 3 years. Sun is talking about it already (probably Xen based in 2007), IBM already has hypervisor functionality in their non-Intel server hardware … a standardized hypervisor across Intel hardware is almost a certainty. If VMWare makes ESX open source (yes open source, not just free) then they have the chance it could be their product on all the hardware out there.
Tools are a much more interesting area. Xen doesn’t have tools while VMWare has some pretty substantial product lines beyond the base system (ESX) and there are many ESX management tools/utilities provided by third parties as well.
So will VMWare go whole-hog and offer us an open source ESX? I think they will, the real question is whether they will offer it while they can still win the war (while Xen tools are immature).
For different takes on this you can try one of the following:
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Posted by Fraser Campbell
Tue, 31 Jan 2006 11:51:00 GMT
VMWare CEO Diane Greene is interviewed by the register. Nothing much of impact in the article but there are some interesting points regarding Xen:
You know, I think there is a lot to this software. There is no question. We have been at it for eight years. It is running your whole system, so it better be darn robust.
The more functionality we provide, the higher the customer’s ROI will be because they can do more with it.
Xen is just emerging as something that you can actually run. If Xen turns into something that is really great, we’ll embrace it. I don’t think our customers would be very happy if we embraced it today.
Read the complete interview at the Register
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Posted by Fraser Campbell
Sun, 08 Jan 2006 15:57:00 GMT
Dell has released a whitepaper entitled “VMWare VMotion Performance on the Dell PowerEdge 1855 Blade Server”. Download it here.
The whitepaper addresses Windows live migration and the performance impact that users may see as a migration is in progress. Even though the virtual machines are quite small (512MB RAM) the performance numbers and total time for migration do seem quite impressive.
This paper doesn’t mean much for a Linux admin but it at least shows what may be possible.
Does vmotion work with Linux, does it work well and with stability? I have learned to not trust anything that a software vendor promises.
If anyone has used Linux and vmotion together in any large scale deployment I would be very interested to hear about it. I am planning on doing similar tests myself with Xen and Linux virtual machines, stay tuned.
Thanks to Alessandro Perilli for the news.
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Posted by Fraser Campbell
Fri, 16 Dec 2005 21:08:00 GMT
Generally availability of VMWare Player was announced on December 12th.
The “player” is a proprietary product available as a free download.
Several flavors of virtual machines are supported:
- Microsoft Virtual Server
- Symantec LiveState Recovery disk format (not actually a virtual machine format)
- VMWare ESX
- VMWare GSX
- VMWare Workstation
All of the products listed above are commercial products which cost real money but the ability to use virtual machines created by these products at no charge (beyond the OS license, if applicable) is definitely a revolution on VMWare’s behalf.
Both 32 and 64 bit machines (host and guest) are supported. We wonder what a VM player having integrated Google search means???
Many prebuilt virtual images are available via the Virtual Machine Center.
This is bound to revolutionize the low-end virtualization market particularly for Windows users wanting to try Linux. We wonder will Microsoft be releasing a downloadable image of XP for VMWare Player soon? Might be a shrewd move …
See VMWare’s announcement for more details.
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