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For a beginner I would say Virtual Box. It is open sourced - GPL version 2 compliant licensing. The hypervisor is software based - so runs as an app on your existing machine; this also means you have the flexibility of turning it off - and regaining full resources for your host operating system if/when you need it (e.g. if you play high performance video games or other processing/ram intensive activities).

It allows you to manage most of the functionality of a normal virtual environment including virtual network connections, allocation of resources to VMs and so on. It supports a large number of guest OSs to varying degrees of fidelity.

Finally - I found it to be easy to install and use compared to other virtual environments.

After you've played with Virtual Box for some time and want to do something more serious on the server side - I would advise using AMD processor based systems with lots of RAM and harddrive space [or network attached storage], and upgrading to bare metal hypervisors such as KVM or VMWare.

The free hypervisor is here: http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html

You'll need a license key, which you can also get (for free of course) on that website.

VMware tends to be fussy about the hardware. I had a non-descript Athlon dual core that ran VMware just fine but lacked horsepower and wa maxed out on RAM at 4GB. I decided to buy a 6 core Athlon, new motherboard and 16 GB of RAM. VMware installed just fine but the clock drifted all over the place (several seconds per minute). Finally gave up on VMware and went Xen. Xen worked just fine but lacked all of the nice management tools and virtual networking stuff that VMware had. SIGH.

Also, it will only install if you have a supported network card in your target box. Check the hardware requirements.

If you want to try VMware, there is a free version: http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html

Oh yeah, one other downside of VMware is the management console only runs on Windoze (at least when I was using it about a year or so ago). You will still need a separate, standalone Windows box

Cheers,
Dave

VMWare is simple and easy for beginners and there is a lot of third part support for things like VM backups that are also free.

https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=free-esxi5&lp=default

I use VMWare at home on a HP DC7700 business desktop that I picked up that my work was giving away and I have it in our lab at work running on those same type of desktops. I have 6GB ram in them. My home ESXi has 3 network cards. I run my IPCOP router on one card, my "blue" network on another, and my "green" on the third. One cheap desktop running ESXi replaced my white box IPCOP router and allows me to run 4 additional general purpose virtual machines as well. I currently have Ubuntu, 2 Windows 7 machines, and 2 XP machines on it now but not all run at the same time. The internal SATA disk in it is kindof slow but I mount another VMFS via NFS from a second Linux machine. None of that is required though.

If ESX comes with support for all of your hardware, setting it up is literally, sticking in the CD, booting it, configuring a console IP and network settings and the password. Unplg the monitor and KB and you are done. The rest it through the client which you can download directly from the ESX server web interface. If you have hardware that is not built into the kernel, you may be able to find the drivers or you are out of luck.

I've been using ESX in very large production environments for over 7 years so my idea of easy to setup and use may be a little biased because I am used to it.

I also maintain HyperV clusters, it works but no where near the ease of setup.

Update

You need Unixware 7.1 to run. DD wont work as it is not a VMWare image disk file.

I know the cost of a new license is $699 per CPU plus $1999 for a TCP/IP, but I would upgrade. The business reason is your ancient 15 year old server is going to die. All it takes is a single prolonged power outage like the one in New York City that your APC can keep on forever and your ancient PSU is TOAST! Systems that old do not reboot reliable.

So your business case it to virtualize it so it can run on newer hardware forever and you wont be caught with your pants down if something happens and it will on such an ancient beast. So buy a new shiny Linux box, install VMWorkstation (VSX or VSPhere is waaaay too expensive unless you run a server farm/data center) and install a fresh copy of Unixware 7.x on a virtual machine and over the network copy the program, config files, and database files. With virtualization you can consolidate and you can put more things on the same box to save power like your DNS Server or a Windows file share too on a different vms to cut down on the amount of servers.

Good luck.

The problem is not the vmotion, it is that your hardware clocks are off. Oddly, we have no problems with ESX servers with hardware clocks that are off. The hardware clock on the physical ESX server only come into play if you are using vmtools and have the option to set the system clock from the hardware clock on a repeated basis. I'm not sure why you would do that. Every system can and does keep its own time independent of the hardware clock except at bootup. If your system time is constantly being set set from the hardware clock for some reason, then synchronize your hardware clocks with NTP? That's not hard at all.

I suggest reading this
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/Timekeeping-In-VirtualMachines.pdf

There is no good way to get it on 200 servers and 2000 desktops in under 48 hours without causing major problems.
You are not doing something right then.
I can update our entire enterprise (800 windows servers spread around in 13 countries) by myself with a single or a hundred patches in a few minutes and a few mouse clicks. Sure, reboots will have to planned out but if the business allowed it and if we did not have any clusters and domain controllers to worry about, I could reboot them all at the same time as well. I don't handle desktops but our patching software can do them as to.

We use VMWare vCenter protect. It's not just for virtual servers running on VMWare either. It used to be called Shavlik Netchk protect before VMWare bought them.

http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-protect/overview.html

It takes a little planning ahead of time to get the system up and running but it really is simple. We have a plain txt file on a DFS share that we add MS patch numbers to (The Q numbers). We also have our servers listed by groups in plain text files as well. Every single week on a schedule the patching system scans all computers listed in those text files looking for patches in the other txt file and reports what is missing. During our maintenance windows, we deploy what it previously reported as missing. We have two groups of servers based on Tier, Tier1 installs the patches and Tier 2 installs the patches and reboots. Like I said, deploying a patch takes a few clicks.

Really simple example, if someone adds two new servers in NY and we approve two new patches for the enterprise, I add the two new servers in NY_Tier1.txt and I add the Q numbers to the bottom of approved_patches.txt . DONE. Our next downtime window will have those servers listed along with all of the other servers in that list with what they are missing and we deploy.

I do not know. I do know the newer mainframes shut off cores and turn them on depending on load. This will save power while I imagine it would be difficult or impossible to do this with a server farm that easily.

VMware will do the same thing, but at a server level -- DRS can migrate virtual servers off of lightly used physical servers and then power off the physical server. Bringing them back online will take a few minutes since it needs to wait for the physical server to reboot after it's powered back on.

VMWare workstation - https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_workstation/9_0

Works great for me, both for running linux on windows and windows on linux.

Mac, due to Apple licensing, obviously is not really available.

- Toast

I'll download a 30 day trial of VMware Workstation 9, then download and install Windows 8 Preview ISO DVD and see for myself before I bitch & moan about it on Slashdot. From linked article in the original post, lack of intuitive, user-friendly customization, as well as lack of advanced customization options is a problem, not an opinion.

http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/pricing.html

If you don't want to follow the link.. it clearly states "per processor", which indicates no core limit.

It only affects windows and mac systems. ESXi is Linux.

ESXi is not Linux in and of itself, it is a Hypervisor. ESXi boots a minimal Linux kernel, which then loads vmkernel (the Hypervisor) along with some other virtualization components. After vmkernel is loaded, it takes direct control of the hardware and partitions the Linux kernel off into the first VM with a custom BusyBox shell (compiled for vmkernel support) as the Service Console. While the vmkernel does utilize a proc filesystem and some modified linux kmods for 3rd party device driver support, it in and of itself is a microkernel and does not nearly contain all of the Linux API's. It has very few ways to communicate with the outside world, one of them being the Service Console itself. But you can literally crash (and reboot) or CPU bound the Service Console up completely and have little to no effect on the other VM's running on that host.

ESX did contain a mostly complete Linux distro that was also cast off into a guest VM after vmkernel loaded. This Service Console was based off of RHEL, but they've abandoned ESX support in the latest versions of their Hypervisor releases and it will eventually be EOL.

Even better run it in the new VMWare Fusion Tech Preview, which includes 3D support for Linux and is free till October.

http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/beta/fusiontp2012

__

This requires certain models of phone with the hypervisor loaded by the manufacturer, but creates two partitions on your phone, one like the blackberry (encrypted, remote wipeable, secure, app streaming, no access to add user apps but system can administer global apps in the work partition), and the other a personal android phone. Even has separate work and personal phone number identities. Just swipe the screen back and forth, and you switch between personal and work spaces. http://www.vmware.com/products/mobile/overview.html

http://www.vmware.com/products/vshield/overview.html

Yes you can:
http://www.vmware.com/products/thinapp/overview.html

http://spoon.net/studio

I thought MS had the tools but it was just pre-JITing.

Maybe it's just me, but best practice seems to indicate vCenter SHOULD be on a physical appliance, based upon the added benefits. Cons seem to be the same count-wise between physical and virtual instances of vCenter.

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11197

Reading the actual pros\cons list, a virtual vCenter is not a good idea....

The "doc" (opinion) you referenced is from 2009 and references VI 3.x. Licensing was significanly changed with 4, making his points on licensing moot.

My favorite point he makes for a 'pro' of physical is "Most scalable, cause performance are limited only by server hardware." So upgrading physical hardware is easier than adding virtual resources?

I've done it both ways. Had both a physical (3.x) and virtual (4) die. I rebuilt vCenter as virtual after the physical died. HA recovered the virtual without me doing anything. Running vCenter virtual makes sense for the same reasons your run any application virtual.

The Appliance has a bunch of limitations (like not working with View Composer, etc).

It also isn't available anymore. There was a 5.0 version, however with the release of 5.0U1, there is only the Windows version - "vCenter Server Appliance 5.0 Update 1 will be available later this year." Link

Maybe it's just me, but best practice seems to indicate vCenter SHOULD be on a physical appliance, based upon the added benefits. Cons seem to be the same count-wise between physical and virtual instances of vCenter.

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11197

Reading the actual pros\cons list, a virtual vCenter is not a good idea....

I prefer to keep vCenter as a physical server - if my physical vCenter server goes down, my VMWare cluster can run happily along until I can restore it to new hardware. However, If my VMware cluster has problems, not having the vCenter server around makes it harder to get things working again.

Shared disk does not make I/O happy.

This was addressed during the VMWorld 2011 conference. VMWare is only limited by the amount of hardware you throw at it just like any other x86 platform: Achieving a Million I/O Operations per Second from a Single VMware vSphere 5.0 Host
http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10211

You can go with IBM/Power or Oracle/SPARC if you have exceptionally large systems, but if you're coming from x86 applications there are minimal CPU, Memory, IO limitations which can't be resolved. The only limitations for x86 virtualization are proprietary cards, clock skew and overhead (not an issue for 95% of cases).

In exchange you get hardware abstraction and portability, availability, the ability to scale much easier, consolidation, ease of deployment and management... etc etc.

If you aren't virtualized you are behind the times; that applies to RISC as well. Just make sure you architect a proper solution to handle the load you intend to run! And when you add more load, expand the infrastructure BEFORE you start having performance issues.

VMware shares source code via their Community Source program. No idea if that's how the Chinese military got the code.

Anyways, it looks like VMWare is going open source soon!

Soon? You mean already.

Much, but not all, of Vmware has long been opensource.
But you don't put out security bulletins when your opensource is stolen, now do you?

That was a joke son.

sorry, i didn't see any humorous context. whoosh on me.

No, because as a hobbyist, I lack the money to spend on buying devices on which to test, which rules out designing specifically for mobile. What's the best practice for smaller sites to test on devices that none of the staff happens to own?

well i guess that puts us on uneven ground because i'm not a hobbyist. you have concerns i don't normally deal with. but there are answers for you. vmware or your favorite virtualization software allows you to run other OSes in an application window on your machine, and are often free (like vmware). you don't need to buy (or borrow someone else's) devices for testing. http://www.vmware.com/products/player/overview.html

as for mobile, again virtualization but this time i use the SDKs in eclipse. for android you can get an instance of any screen resolution of any android version up and running in minutes, as a windowed virtual device on your screen. it simulates hardware capability too so unless your computer is weaker than a smartphone you're ok. the SDK and Android Virtual Device Manager are free. i've never had to design for iphone, but if i did i would try the community (free) edition of Titanium Studio to see whether it's worth passing on the $50/month cost to the client requesting the work.

Pure progressive enhancement would imply sending only the headline on the initial page view and then having JavaScript download the kicker once the CSS media queries have resolved. Some purists want the server to ignore the User-agent: entirely

i can't tell if by "initial page view" you're talking about the document's ready state. i'm going to assume you're aware that javascript can delay commands until the entire html payload has reached the browser without making another request. apart from you, i've never met such a purist. if your server side code is checking the user-agent, your users are not paying for that check with their data limit. the data limit is for what they send and receive, not what servers do in between the sending and receiving.

i'm not much for avoiding technology or techniques based on superstition (though i have met programmers who do). my personal opinions on technology are mostly based on my evaluation of them, and not how i feel about them or the company that put them out. there's a kind of "purism" in me that despises apple because of their steve jobs cult of personality but ultimately my displeasure for them comes down to things like godawful design decisions, like, e.g., not splitting the mouse buttons or the really retarded spotlight search functionality, or that all the window buttons (close, minimize) are on the left for left-handed users when most people are right handed. but i won't refuse to use them if something requires me to, or something more important to me is made more convenient. i just can't see any good argument against a user-agent check, if your goal is to target specific machines and their capabilities. "i just don't want to" doesn't cut it for me.

If I replace the content entirely, then the replaced content still counts against the viewer's monthly download quota.

if you read me a little closer, you'll see that i suggest that your replaced content would be less content than what you serve to desktops. that will lower the hit on their quota. the replaced content is whatever you want it to be, so how much data you're asking the user to expend is up to you. you can also just build a simpler, scaled-down version of your site for mobile and redirect to it when the sniffer finds a mobile device. you are in full control of what you send to your users.

I thought VMWare supported OS/2 now, though unofficial. You do need hardware virtual support though. http://partnerweb.vmware.com/GOSIG/IBMOS_2_Warp_4.html
The x86 feature that OS/2 uses is running some stuff in ring 2, which is how DOS drivers can work under OS/2. Every other operating system just uses ring 0 and ring 3, which is compatible across architectures.

Better yet run it in a vm =)

Now tell me what you can do with MS Windows and or Linux you can't do with a Mac.

How about virtualization? How about terminal services? How about configuration management?

Virtualizing? Let's see. There'e VirtualBox, VMWare's Fusion 4, and Parallels. I don't have it setup right now but I'm going to try to use VirtualBox so I can run my dualboot Ubuntu installation in a virtual machine while running OSX. If that does not work then I'll try Fusion 4. OSX has terminal. Being based on FreeBSD many of the commands are the same as in Linux. Look at that, there's even Open Source configuration management software that runs on OSX.

Falcon

You obviously didn't understand what I was talking about *at all*. You mentioned VirtualBox, Fusion 4, and Parallels. Try running OS X in VirtualBox or Parallels without using a hacked up OSx86 version. Oh wait you can't. Try virtualizing more than two instances of OS X on the same server by any method without violating the EULA. Oh wait you can't. Try doing anything remotely useful with OS X and virtualization, the single most important and transformative technology in the IT world today. Oh wait you can't.

In response to my asking about terminal services, you respond "OSX has terminal". Clearly you have no idea what I'm talking about and didn't even bother to do the five seconds of googling to find out. Terminal services refers to the ability to have one server host multiple remote login gui sessions, each with their own desktop and user settings. I refrained from calling it "Remote Desktop", because you'd probably come back with Apple Remote Desktop, misunderstanding the conversation yet again. ARD is just VNC with a few bells and whistles thrown in.

That's very, very strange.
However, http://blog.zimbra.com/ has stuff from november 2011 and they are obiously hiring : http://jobs.vmware.com/search?q=zimbra.com%2Fcareers
But still, it is owned by VMWare, I mean they must be aware of the impression a 2 year old "latest news" item gives to a visitor.

Now tell me what you can do with MS Windows and or Linux you can't do with a Mac.

How about virtualization? How about terminal services? How about configuration management?

Virtualizing? Let's see. There'e VirtualBox, VMWare's Fusion 4, and Parallels. I don't have it setup right now but I'm going to try to use VirtualBox so I can run my dualboot Ubuntu installation in a virtual machine while running OSX. If that does not work then I'll try Fusion 4. OSX has terminal. Being based on FreeBSD many of the commands are the same as in Linux. Look at that, there's even Open Source configuration management software that runs on OSX.

Falcon

Have you seen the requirements for the VMware VCDX and Cisco Certified Architect certifications that require prospectives to submit an application, have suitable experience shown, be accepted, build a design to certain requirements, and then defend their design choices in front of a panel?

Why on earth would anyone do this, other than if they actually like what they do? Finishing an MBA sounds easier than this AND gets you a larger salary and better promotion aspects. For someone with a college degree in IT and several years of technical experience in industry, the MBA is a better option. It offers more bang for buck, and having a business-level manager with technical experience in an organisation probably makes for a star-performer employee.

There are really own two certs I respect: Cisco's CCIE and Oracle's OCM. Both require hands-on lab demonstrations of skill. (Is RedHat doing that now, too?)

Microsoft MCM certifications require hands-on lab demonstrations of skill. And there are plenty of other IT certs with similar requirements, that are not simple "pass a test, get the cert".

Have you seen the requirements for the VMware VCDX and Cisco Certified Architect certifications that require prospectives to submit an application, have suitable experience shown, be accepted, build a design to certain requirements, and then defend their design choices in front of a panel?

They kind of make Oracle OCM and IE look like like 'easy' certs by comparison.

There are also things like CISSP-ISSMP, where applicants actually must have 2 years of job experience specifically related to the knowledge base and positive references to certify, in addition to passing tests, and they must show a fair number of hours of continuing education every year to stay certified; so holding the papers there takes a lot more than just passing a test too.

So just out of laziness I posted without login in and SlashDot calls posting anonynously "Anonymous coward"? Strange!!! Timothy, All the anonymous proxies you mentioned are internet based proxies and you are right, it is hard to trust a third person with your data. But why dont you use janus VM(just mentioning because it is not one of the options on the link you provided). It is a VM you run on one of your systems on DMZ port for example and then you route through it. So yes, it is hard to trust someone else but you can trust yourself. Have fun. Timothy, All the anonymous proxies you mentioned are internet based proxies and you are right, it is hard to trust a third person with your data. But why dont you use janus VM(just mentioning because it is not one of the options on the link you provided). It is a VM you run on one of your systems on DMZ port for example and then you route through it. So yes, it is hard to trust someone else but you can trust yourself. Have fun. http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/86043 janusvm.com

If you have ~100+ tabs opening every time you restart your web browser, I highly recommend using a Squid proxy.

Good place to start is here - self-contained virtual machine, power on and go:
http://communities.vmware.com/message/1887680

I've seen a couple stories about it but I haven't met anyone using it. I assume we're talking about this

When was the last time you tried to virtualize Windows machines?
Linux is easy if you know how:
-rsync a live system
-stop daemons
-rsync again
-shutdown netwerk on old machine
-enable network on new VM
-send_arp to flush arp caches in network infra.
Resulting in downtime of a few minutes (depending on volume size and network thoughput).
But Windows is far from a PITA, http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/ does it in the same way. It worked perfectly in a recent switch of virtualization provider for 4 Windows machines.

--All of my browsing goes through a Linux-based Squid proxy with its own DNS settings, so I'm not really worried. Check it out, it's free:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1828477#1828477

Before VirtualBox, there used to be 2 virtualization softwares for desktop FreeBSD. One was Win4BSD, from Virtual Bridges. They have redone their product line, and that product is no more, I think. And there was another product too, but I forget.

Anyways, VMWare works with FreeBSD too: http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/new_guest_tools_ws.html

What costs? Have you ever heard of VMWare Player? Does not cost a thing and works great.

Yes, and it's totally enterprise ready what with it's live migration and.. er.. wait

If you have hundreds of VMs, you should try vSphere Hypervisor (which is also free):

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html

VMware has a couple of really BIG problems in their platform.

1. Their management tools are windows centric and so is Virtual Center for that matter
2. Their licensing model is confusing as hell and requires a spreadsheet to figure out what you need without overpaying
3. They have so many products that it gets downright confusing to determine which one works for your purpose.
4. They use "old school" sales tactics that just don't work for more modern companies.

Your first point is slowly becoming less of an issue. With vSphere 5 you can now run a Linux appliance for Virtual Center which will do for starters, and it doesn't even require (or support) an external database. Hopefully this will expand to be the only way to get VC, but they'll expand it to use a DB when you get big enough, and make plugins work with it. There's also supposed to be a '75%' web client, e.g. good enough for 75% of tasks and a full web client in the next major update, (5.5?) That's how VMView has been for at least the last major release too, the previous might have been web too, I can't remember.

They have a lot of products because they do a lot of things... regular old server virtualization, enterprise grade server virtualization with HA, desktop (I want a test box), desktop (VDI), disaster recovery (with a replicating san), disaster recovery (without a replicating SAN)... If you don't know what you want to do, looking at their product sheet won't help you any.

I'll give you that vRAM is evil and sales people are douches, but isn't that one a given?

I defy you to go to VMware's website and tell me what the current version of ESXi is, what the free license includes, what the cost is for an academic institution that wants the cheapest licensed version, what features that includes - with specific descriptions, not just names and vague "Enable more robust blah blah" horseshit, and what exactly you would need to download.

The site is intentionally a mess in order to trick people into buying more than they need. It also makes getting updates and changelogs near impossible because you never know what version of what shittily-named product you have. They recently went to ESXi 5, and there was a press release that touted hundreds of new features, and explained about 5 of them in the vaguest detail possible. There are links to various pages on their site to learn more about the hundreds of other new features, but that information simply doesn't exist. All you can get is the shitty presser.

And look at this fucking 10 page topic on "Is there a free version of ESXi 5?". http://communities.vmware.com/thread/320883

The short answer is "Yes, just install it with no license.", but the real answer is there is no fucking specific license for a free version, so there is no guarantee it will remain an option, or that anupdate won't break it, or that your trial license won't be invalidated at some point, or that features won't be turned off for no reason as they did when going from ESX 3 to ESX 4 / ESXi 4.

VMware is fast approaching IBM and Cisco levels of intentional ambiguity. All they need is a shitty "brand awareness" marketing campaign that doesn't feature a product or service, but shows school kids in china teleconferencing with school kids in the US, with no lag, in the middle of the day at both locations.

What costs? Have you ever heard of VMWare Player? Does not cost a thing and works great.

All good advice. Make sure that your hardware in on VMware's HCL. If it isn't you can run into all sorts of problems and show stoppers (though these can be great learning opportunities as well). I'm upgrading my lab next year and am seriously looking at getting a small Dell server (we have some that we're pulling out from our data center) and maybe something from Synology.

We have a lab at the office and some development/testing space on our production systems, but there's nothing like a home lab that you can control.

VMware vSphere also has vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) which is designed to handle an ESXi host hardware failure. Conceptually, it keeps a synched copy of the VMs memory (Windows or Linux) on a second host ready to switch it over if host #1 fails. http://www.vmware.com/products/fault-tolerance/overview.html

High Availability (HA) will simply restart your VMs (whether Linux or Windows) on another ESXi host. They are two different things and FT costs more.

More examples:

Coverity

VMWare

Xen

Then again, the work I did for my thesis never made it past "research prototype". Papers are the "coin of the realm" in academia. There's a very long way between "proof of concept that runs well enough to take measurements and publish" and "something I can sell to someone", and there are no papers in between. That leaves entrepreneurs, or departments / people who do it just out of the goodness of their hearts.

I've got a good heart I think, but nowhere near good enough to spend all day at work coding, and then come home and code some more. :-)

RIM announced plans for a phone "VM" platform ages ago - you get a physical device, it has two OS's one for personal use, one for work. Or make it dual-boot... Or use VPN. We have a million ways to achieve this for PC's, why not smartphones?

Do you mean something like this? http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/cto/emerging/blog/2010/12/08/vmw-partners-with-lg-to-bring-virtualization-to-smartphones

i'm not lazy, and you haven't proven anything. i'm fully aware of shared storage; how do you think i could successfully switch a service from an old server to a new one using a cat5 splitter with a toggle switch if the two machines weren't accessing the same data? shared storage has little to do with benefits of virtualisation. my question was how to you change hardware without disconnecting sessions that are connected to the guest os? i'm also aware of fast network reconnections, but if i was in the middle of copying a big file and someone migrated the server through which i was copying from (using shared storage or not), i can't imagine how my copy wouldn't be aborted - it seemed like that's what you were implying you could do with your op. i would be quite happy to be proven wrong. just don't expect me to be fooled by irrespective technobabble. i found http://www.vmware.com/products/vmotion/features.html via your google link and there was nothing that seemed overly impressive and nothing that mentioned maintaining network sessions ("zero downtime to the end-users" doesn't mean it doesn't lose connections - even if its only for an instant).

Virtualisation is, in many ways, trying to do what the OS should already be doing, namely isolation between processes (though protected memory), providing an abstraction layer for the hardware (though drivers) and allocating resources (through the CPU/IO schedulers).

Unfortunately, a certain OS has been so bad at doing this (historically) that people turn to virtualisation and you end up with a form of inner-platform effect. We have Linux implementing the virtio drivers to interface with the hypervisor which implements real drivers to talk to the real hardware. We have the guest's scheduler trying to manage "virtual CPUs" without any real information about what resources are actually available. We have hypervisors trying to re-implement copy-on-write for memory pages that the OS already does out-of-the-box.

Virtualisation is used as a "one size fits all" sledgehammer, often where it isn't the appropriate solution.

Um.... Storage vMotion on VMware is an Enterprise feature, not Enterprise Plus.

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/buy/editions_comparison.html

(Yeah, I know, 5.0 instead of 4.1 - I couldn't find the 4.1 chart right off)

I can confirm this. I'm on 4.1 enterprise, and I have storage vmotion

Um.... Storage vMotion on VMware is an Enterprise feature, not Enterprise Plus.

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/buy/editions_comparison.html

(Yeah, I know, 5.0 instead of 4.1 - I couldn't find the 4.1 chart right off)

VMWare's CTO Steve Herrod recently gave Forbes an interview that explained their new "MVP" (Mobile Virtual Platform) line. Soon you will be able to have phone images "delivered" to you, similar to their VMWare View product.

VMWare's CTO Steve Herrod recently gave Forbes an interview that explained their new "MVP" (Mobile Virtual Platform) line. Soon you will be able to have phone images "delivered" to you, similar to their VMWare View product.