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For the lazy people here, try this one: http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/64572

The other thing you want to check is support for clock sync between host and guest OS's with your vm of choice. For instance, Vmware has had lots of issues with this, esp. w/AMD chips and/or Windows hosts (e.g., http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=916&sliceId=2&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&dialogID=10148667&stateId=0%200%2012087601)

If you get root on any VM on the system, you can take control of the system, not just the VM.

If this is true with this exploit (as I assume it is), this is a big deal.

VMWare is currently of the opinion that it is an OK practice to collapse security zones (eg DMZ/App/DB servers) onto the same physical host.

Even their documents on PCI compliance with virtualization doesn't say this is a bad idea.

People in the real world are using VMs as a substitute for more traditional physical security boundaries. If an exploit like this can allow you to VM hop (even if difficult), targeted attacks against PCI compliant institutions are not unlikely.

Anyone really want another Hearland?

sorry. forgot the link. and I meant you pop in the Windows install disk.

http://vmware.com/download/server/

VMware Server is free.

It's more than up to the task you are trying to accomplish.

Yes, it's yet another buzzword, but its use has become fairly common. Good case in point: VMware's Virtual Appliance Marketplace ;-)

Reece

Did I miss some sort of shift in terminology? When did virtual machines start getting referred to as "Appliances"? When I think "appliance", I usually think of toasters, microwaves, stoves, refrigerators, etc. Images for operating systems is the last thing that comes to mind.

I think it becomes an 'appliance' when it comes already configured and downloadable to you like a black box.

VMware currently hosts some large number here. Like an 'appliance', you plug it in and go without worrying about the fiddly bits.

Of course, if you want to install it all from scratch, go ahead. :-P

Cheers

If a student works on a document on a Linux box at school and then takes it home to work on they'll be in for a shock.

I never had this problem, whether I used Linux, OS X , or Windows in school or at home. And yes, I used all three OSes both in school and at home. Now I have another advantage, I can run all three OSes on the same computer, and using a virtual machine I can run them at the same tyme. I'm typing this on a Mac running Leopard and have been thinking about installing Ubuntu on it to make it a dualboot PC. If I do I can run Ubuntu inside Leopard by using one of a number of VMs. Many store that sell Macs also sell Parallels and VmWare. Vrtualbox is an open source VM that works on all three OSes.

Falcon

First of all, XenServer 5 has HA.

And does VMware free have it? hahaha no.

VMware standard is required and that will cost you $3624 for a 2 cpu socket license with 1 year of support, without any VirtualCenter license.

"4 seperate copies of all the userland shared libs..."

http://blogs.vmware.com/virtualreality/2008/03/memory-overcomm.html

You don't run VMWare ESX or XenServer either one *on* Windows or *on* Linux. They're considered "bare-metal" hypervisors:

As I understand it, VMWare ESX is not a hypervisor and still requires a host OS. A newer product, VMware ESXi and XenServers are hypervisors, which don't require a host OS.

This KB article shows the difference between VMware ESX and ESXi.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1006543

No realistic deployment of the ESX enterprise edition costs less than $10,000. You have to buy a minimum of one $5000 license, for each server, plus, you have to buy additional licenses for each server that has more than 2 CPUs; you can only apply these in increments of 2, so if your server has 7 CPUs, you will have to buy _5_ $5000 licenses for that server.

Also, the management server costs are $5000 at least. I'm not counting the licensing costs for SQL Server, or another copy of Windows to run management.

Let's say you have 4 servers you want to run VMs on, each has two processors. The _cheapest_ way to license that is to buy an Enterprise Acceleration kit, with the minimum (1 year SnS), which costs $30,486.00. You can see that here if you click on the 'VMware Infrastructure Enterprise Acceleration Kit' link.

If you later want to add a 5th server that has 4 physical CPUs in it, that will cost you $10,000 in licensing fees, to add that additional server to your environment.

We haven't even gotten into the high recurring costs you get if you want to actually maintain those support rights...

I generally agree with what you say, one side note though, VMWare ESX can actually share memory between different VM's if the contents of it are the same. http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_memory.pdf (see page 4)

While you're at it, download ESXi to be fair. VMware Server is no comparison with the Enterprise products and comparing it against XenServer would be unfair at best.

Now, in counterpoint, you DO have to pay for the advanced features of ESXi that are free in XenServer, but at least you'll have a fair comparison to work with.

Hmm...

Ask and ye shall receive

* VMware ESX - enterprise grade virtualisation server. Combined with vmware infrastructure, you run a bare minimum hypervisor (no overhead from a standard linux or windows OS host), store your virtual machines on a SAN or NFS, have a pool of physical servers and automatically load-balance your VMs between them or even bring them back up automatically if a physical server goes bang. Nearly completely abstract your servers from the hardware, run 20 servers per actual piece of tin. Very much not free.

Almost. What you're describing is full "VMware Infrastructure". ESX is the bare-metal hypervisor - and has actually been "replaced" with ESXi. This is a stripped down version that has a smaller install footprint and therefore a lower exposure to exploits. Most of the old ESX patches were for things like Samba and CUPS on the service console. ESXi now comes from vendors like Dell in an embedded form even: 32MB on an SD card, pre-installed, no hard drive required.

You can use local storage with ESX and ESXi; just format it with VMFS. When you're dealing with live-migration (vmotion), automated resource balancing (DRS) and bringing VMs back up after a bang (HA), that's all part of VMware Infrastructure and Virtual Center.

Very much not free - BUT the ESXi installable hypervisor? Free. Go download it now if you want it. Due to the stripped down nature, it supports a more limited set of hardware than VMware Server (which relies on a regular host OS to work out the hardware details), but it performs much better. Depending on the host hardware and VM workload, you can get a 20:1 VM:host ratio with your eyes closed.

you forgot the other feature the others don't have - the ability to "share" memory pages so you can fit more guests on a single server. Works especially well when you use a guest as a snapshot base for other guests.

I believe there is a Linux GUI (not a Web GUI) version of ESX available.

http://www.vmware.com/download/download.do?downloadGroup=ESX_255
http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/

I believe there is a Linux GUI (not a Web GUI) version of ESX available.

http://www.vmware.com/download/download.do?downloadGroup=ESX_255
http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/

The only reason I have a Windows image at home is for a couple of games. So far, only VMWare Workstation can handle Windows gaming with any decent speed since it supports DirectX. Do any of the other virtualizers work well with gaming? I'm talking about games like COD4, America's Army, and others based on the UT2/UT3 engine.

It most certainly doesn't handle games with decent speed. Lets look at the game compability list, updated this month:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-1287

Now lets look at your games:

COD4 - "Starts up fine, but too slow to play. Frame rate is about 2 FPS at 640x480 with all settings reduced to minimum. VM settings - 1.5GB ram, 2 VCPU's, optimize for VM."

America's Army - Not on the list

UT2/UT3 - Not on the list. Not sure which games on the list might be derivatives

Other complaints even for games reported to work are "choppy sound, minor texture glitches", "Sluggish, but playable.", "Flawless; low FPS", "Flickery top bar and "Sticky" graphics"

This does not sound to me like something a frequent gamer would put up with, when dual booting would give much better results.

VMWare is to be applauded for their DirectX effort, but they're not quite there yet.

• VMware Fusion
• VMware server
• VMware workstation
• VMware view
• VMware ESX
• VMware Player
• VMware ACE

Is VMware viewer this product http://store.vmware.com/servlet/ControllerServlet?Action=DisplayPage&Env=BASE&Locale=en_US&SiteID=vmware&id=ProductDetailsPage&productID=94648100 ? If so, what does it exactly do for me? Can I create virtual machines? Can I open .vm machines? Can I connect to some remote server hosting and running the machines, like a VNC?

Thanks,
~T~

VMware View Open Client lets you connect from a Linux desktop to remote Windows desktops managed by VMware View.

http://store.vmware.com/servlet/ControllerServlet?Action=DisplayPage&Env=BASE&Locale=en_US&SiteID=vmware&id=ProductDetailsPage&productID=94648100

VMware View Enterprise Starter Bundle + Platinum (24x7) 3 Year Support

Including View Mgr 3, VC Foundation and VI VDI licensed for 10 desktop VMs (Includes 1 ESX license for 2 CPUs)
        $2,456.25

VMware View Enterprise Starter Bundle + Platinum (24x7) 2 Year Support

Including View Mgr 3, VC Foundation and VI VDI licensed for 10 desktop VMs (Includes 1 ESX license for 2 CPUs)
        $2,197.50

VMware View Enterprise Starter Bundle + Platinum (24x7) 1 Year Support

Including View Mgr 3, VC Foundation and VI VDI licensed for 10 desktop VMs (Includes 1 ESX license for 2 CPUs)
        $1,875.00

VMware View Enterprise Starter Bundle + Gold (12x5) 3 Year Support

Including View Mgr 3, VC Foundation and VI VDI licensed for 10 desktop VMs (Includes 1 ESX license for 2 CPUs)
        $2,303.25

VMware View Enterprise Starter Bundle + Gold (12x5) 2 Year Support

Including View Mgr 3, VC Foundation and VI VDI licensed for 10 desktop VMs (Includes 1 ESX license for 2 CPUs)
        $2,085.90

VMware View Enterprise Starter Bundle + Gold (12x5) 1 Year Support

Including View Mgr 3, VC Foundation and VI VDI licensed for 10 desktop VMs (Includes 1 ESX license for 2 CPUs)
        $1,815.00

without paying the big bucks for VMotion on top of the already-hefty ESX pricetag

hmmm basic ESXi is free.

RE the OEM XP alternative to Microsoft's VECD Connection License;

There was one US Enterprise VMware customer who blogged about having had their Blade hardware vendor (HP or Dell, can't remember) issue OEM XP's licenses for their Virtual Desktops on the given server serial, but Microsoft aren't likely to let that happen again.

I believe that this is the reference the Parent is referring to;

http://geekswithblogs.net/WallabyFan/archive/2007/05/31/112867.aspx

MS Licensing for XP Desktops in VDI/DDI/Virtual Desktop design - VECD (Vista Enteprise Centralized Desktop) - how does it work, and what License do you have to buy?

Hi All,

I had an Integrator ask me for the details on how they could solve the MS Licensing dilemma around a relatively simple (??) VMware XP SP2 Desktops being delivered from an ESX VMware Server. As this was essentially a VDI scenario I found it somewhat interesting that this info didn't appear to be readily available.

As I knew that Prudential UK was listed as a Success Story by VMware at
  http://www.vmware.com/customers/stories/prudential.html

I was able to find that a chap called Andy Ruby was the guy who designed/installed this. Via LinkedIn I was able to contact him and the answer is listed below

As I also have some contacts here in Australia with VMware I was also able to get their response as well (see link to VECD from MS) and below I have passed on my 2 cents worth to the Integrator. I hope all of this makes sense? and I hope you find it useful? VECD Datasheet

With regards to Prudential in the UK:

Hi David
Prudential used an OEM licence issued by HP. Each XP OEM licences was tied to the serial number of the DL360 servers Prudential deployed. However, I'm not sure this helps you since MS were reluctant to continue with this policy and wanted full XP licences to be purchased for future deployments.

Andy

And this ties in neatly with the Answer from VMware:

The above licensing discusses the Licensing for Vista and the bullet point below is at the bottom of the text. So if all you have is the XPSP2 license then you are not going to be covered. Smart move by Microsoft, as it make any VMware customer a Microsoft customer.

• In both cases customers can install an unlimited number of copies of Windows Vista Enterprise or downgrade operating systems on server hardware and access up to 4 concurrent running instances from a licensed device.

So in Summary, my reading on it at the moment is that if you want to deploy the XP SP2 solution today you effectively have 2 options:

• Purchase full XP SP2 Licenses and go ahead, although you might be on thin ice but it is unlikely MS will complain too loudly
• Purchase Vista with VECD - this leaves you completely in the clear, but at a significant cost disadvantage

That sums it up pretty much at the moment? Please let me know if you disagree or you'd like to discuss this further?

posted on Thursday, May 31, 2007 1:10 PM

I wonder if VMware View will fare better than Citrix. http://www.vmware.com/products/view/ A lot more companies have VMware and VMware experience than Citrix. Ultimately I think in higher ed we will see Linux and Mac numbers increase. Especially in general purpose labs.

I wouldn't go 100% with *thin* clients, but some smarts would be quite adequate. Set up one or two superservers, and a whole bunch of VIA C7 boxen with cheap 17" LCD's and the barest hard drive. Just enough to boot up an X server and connect via XDMCP to t he superserver. That way you can set them up without any optical drives, and safely keep the USB disconnected. You don't really need to worry that the terminal is underpowered, as long as the network that it's connecting to has the bandwidth for XDMCP.... 100mbit (which every C7-board I've ever seen has onboard) is more than adequate... maybe connected into a gigabit or 10gbit switched connection to the server.... client to switch is 100mbit, switch to server is gigabit.

Disclaimer: I work for VMware.

VMware has a pretty good desktop virtualization system. http://vmware.com/solutions/desktop/. Each VM is centrally managed. Furthermore, each student could have their own VM, which eliminates the issues that happen when students start installing stuff on shared desktops.

Contrasting Xenserver with VMWare would have been a better comparison. Xen have gone down the super-thin hypervisor route with only a few tens of thousands of lines of code in their core software, the rest plugged in via API. This is in contract to the integrated bigger approach by the existing market leaders.

AG

The same reason that running Windows XP as a guest is a useful thing: serving (and controlling) virtualized desktops.

VMware's version is View. <rant>When will companies remember that they need to give their products a "Googleable" name?</rant>

Probably as soon as Microsoft changes the name of Word to something else. In other words, you search for VMware View the same way you search for Microsoft Word.

Bad day or not, what's the real benefit of running OS X as a guest?

The same reason that running Windows XP as a guest is a useful thing: serving (and controlling) virtualized desktops.

VMware's version is View. <rant>When will companies remember that they need to give their products a "Googleable" name?</rant>

Apparently, it will become a trend for the high-end tier of technology certifications.
VMware will also be adding it the their VCDX certification, but not to the "more common" VCP.

Apparently, it will become a trend for the high-end tier of technology certifications.
VMware will also be adding it the their VCDX certification, but not to the "more common" VCP.

Apparently, it will become a trend for the high-end tier of technology certifications.
VMware will also be adding it the their VCDX certification, but not to the "more common" VCP.

I assume you mean things like shared dlls.

And IPC. FYI, There is nothing inherently dangerous about sharing DLLs, that memory is either read-only or Copy-on-write. There is much less likely to be a bug in something as simple as shared memory handling code than a VM.

access to users documents, Direct X, OpenGL, screenshots (GIMP)

access to users documents: VMs don't give access to user documents or systemwide screenshots by default. This would lose much of the security of running a VM. Direct X, OpenGL: VMware includes experimental support for Direct3D video acceleration. This feature is not fully functional. Virtual box only supports OpenGL. As far as I know VirtualPC doesn't support either.

And it would STILL be more compatible than what we currently get passed off as "backward compatibility"

Really? Because even Wine offers much better support for gaming than any VM I have come across (which is all I use Vista for). I haven't had any trouble with backwards compatibility with Vista, except with device drivers, and the VMs aren't going to have much use for those. And I have continually hit bugs and limitations with every VM I have come across.

Which sounds more security to you?

Well, myself I'd pick an effective way of sandboxing applications without the overhead of a VM, and then sandbox everything whether it is 64bit or not.

Either you didn't read the entire post, you chose to ignore the part that explains why we would be better off memory wise,...

Maybe because the closest thing is an argument was

Literally at worst your XP application would require 3 gigs of ram. Now consider that you now have an OS that cleanly could access up to 16 exabytes of RAM, the memory limitation would be far worse on the 32 bit native than it would be on the clean 64-bit system running virtual machines as they could load more programs, and each program could have more memory than if it ran native on a 32-bit machine.

None of which explains how running 5 3gig VMs could be more memory efficient than running 32bit code directly on a 64bit kernel allocating only and exactly the memory it needs. And 5*3gig of memory is not all that cheap. Have you considered that it may be you who fails to understand? In any case, this thread has become more confrontational than interesting, and have little interest in spending more time on it.

http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/

The only way that I can see VMWare winning is if everyone else screws up. While that's possible, there's a lot of money at stake in the Virtualization field, and I think the odds of that happening are low.

Take a step back, you're too focused on the products that you use every day and not services and solutions that VMware's aligning itself to offer to it's paying customers (large corporations). VMware knows that everyone has a hypervisor, that's why you can get server and ESX 3i free. Look to products like VMware Site Recovery Manager and you'll see that VMware's direction is to manage your entire datacenter, including completely automating your disaster recovery exercises. Their business model isn't dependent on their free products, however it does give you that familiarity and ease of transferring skill sets if you were to grow to the point of needing a large scale virtualization platform.

• Support for DirectX 9.0c with Shader Model 2 3D graphics

In my experience a lot of people (normal users) will always ask you for IE and Office, simply because they are use to those programs and don't want to change. (creatures of habits).

I think the solution is perfecting Wine to the point that you can run all major windows application without big problems. (excluding IE that is a virus disguised as a web browser)

For applications that can't be executed in Wine maybe the soultion could be using something like Fusion . But of course, this is not an option for Netbooks because of the resources constraints.... (I don't know if there is something that works as well as fusion in Linux)

This is not a good thing: by definition x86 code is not portable across platforms.

I think the article/download site may disagree with you, and I believe that VMWare and VirtualBox would also disagree.

FTA...

"1. Download the Native Client distribution for your development platform: Linux, Mac, or Windows."

Secure or not, it goes against the main founding principle of the web, which is portability.

How is this going against the principles? Having the same code, run on multiple platforms I would have sworn is the definition of portability...

All this is, is virtualization ported to the browsers - why wouldn't this be a good/cool thing?

There are many advantages.
The virtual desktop is "yours". It can be built starting with a standard template. Any changes to your desktop are in addition to the standard template. Meaning, if you have a template that is 10GB and 20 users, you can now have 20 desktops, your total space may only be 30GB total. Your virtual desktop is portable, you can view and use it from within the office, remotely through an SSL gateway, maybe even on your cell phone. VMWare is coming mature with a method that lets you "checkout" that virtual desktop and use it while remote, it can even timeout and stop working after a defined period (think contractors, and temp employees). Think of availability. Your virtual desktop can be hosted at any internet connected facility. If your building goes down, if your were using any type of DRS, you still have your desktop. Applications updates are a breeze, no longer will you have to deploy updates to thousands of desktops, you maintain the template. You push applications (or virtual packaged applications) to the users.
For the business, you can use thick clients or thin clients and connect to this desktop through them. No longer will an employees have to be given a specifically configured laptop or desktop designed by your desktop engineers with all the software they need. They can have just about ANY laptop or desktop and connect to a virtual desktop that has everything they need. And like stated earlier, that common desktop can be maintained and updated easily by just a few engineers/admins.

The part you are not getting is when you have hundreds of users, it is NOT easy to maintain 100's of desktops, well it can be but the sun and moon have to align correctly to make it easy. Virtual desktops allows a company to maintain a common virtual desktop setup with just about any hardware the user has and allows them to connect and use that virtual desktop from just about anywhere at any time. All updates are done on the backend without having to reach out physically or through the network to maintain them.

Citrix is nice for accessing remote applications, a physical desktop is nice while in the office, virtual desktops combine the two giving a single familir desktop with all the advantages of using virtualization (DR, redundancy, consolidated space, management, backups etc...)

Virtualization for desktops is not just a buzz word, there are many cases where this is a true advantage.

I can not speak for IBM's offering because I have only been testing Citrix Xenapp (which we have just about ruled out) and VMWare's offerings of desktop virtualization which just got a facelift this week with View3.
http://www.vmware.com/products/view/

One option I'm reviewing at the moment is Pandora FMS
http://pandora.sourceforge.net/

Not bad and there's a pre-built vm you can download to quickly give it a go.
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/1236

I know the reply is late, but uhm, for almost all of your questions, YES it is the operating systems responsibility.

If every operating system has to implement these things.. uh.. we might be waiting a while. Old operating systems stay around for a long, long time - Microsoft just this year stopped selling Windows 3.1. OS/2 still exists in some places, as does DOS and SCO. XP and Windows Server 2000/2003 will be around a while too. While some operating systems now include some virtualization features, it will probably continue to be useful for some time to virtualize operating systems that don't include their own virtualization.

If you're already running a virtualization layer for some OSes, why not have the layer generic and separate for all OSes? Is there any advantage to having the OS try to virtualize itself? Why should it be the operating system's job to provide these capabilities? (My answer: it shouldn't be the operating system's job; it should be another layer)

Just because you haven't seen an operating system that actually works for shit doesn't mean its not there.

I'm pretty sure we're discussing responsibilities, not capabilities - but I'd love to hear about more OSes that provide these capabilities in-built. We previously mentioned OS/360, Solaris Zones, and userland Linux, which provide some of these capabilities (mainframe OSes more than the others, DLPARs are awesome, but not the end-all-be-all).

And stop listening to all the advertising VMware is selling, when your VM server catches fire and suddenly stops, its not going to mysteriously appear on another VM server without stopping. The machine has to be moved to a new VM server. That move has to be triggered while the original server is alive and well or the contents of ram will be lost meaning you have to boot on the new VM server. Second, while the move is in progress the VM has to be paused so the memory contents are consistent, while this is normally a quick process compared to booting, its not instant and you will most certainly notice the pause on anything with a usable amount of ram.

Learn a little bit about what ACTUALLY happens before you start talking about what marketing tells you happens, it doesn't actually work as flawlessly as you think it does, sorry.

Good point; one of the capabilities I mentioned is not available today from VMWare, and it helps to know current capabilities. Right now you have to move the VM before you set the server on fire. In the future (2009?) you can set the server on fire without previously moving the VM:

http://www.vmware.com/technology/virtual-datacenter-os/application.html

# It then uses vLockstep technology to keep the primary and secondary virtual machines in exactly the same state on another server.
# In the event of hardware failure on the primary virtual machine, the secondary takes over with no disruption to users

I believe certain mainframes have something similar already (though for the life of me I can't remember the name, and Google is failing me.. something about a 10 kilometer limit for fiber interconnect for it to work) - basically two machines execute the same code in tandem, but the result (and I/O) is only used from one. Everything from memory to I/O state to CPU registers is sync'd to within a second.

Anyways, I don't think the current availability of this capability affects whether or not it (or the other capabilities) are the role of the OS or a separate VM layer, which what we were discussing. I'm still of the mind that these capabilities are best served by a separate VM layer under the OS, if for no other reason than organizations need to support multiple operating systems.

You could use vmware converter to turn your physical machine into a virtual machine then continue to make your changes to the virtual machine only and use the features of the vm-host (vmware/virtual box/virtualPC/etc..) to track the changes.

I have a vague recollection that it's possible to track changes with the vm-host but I guess it all falls down if not. Do any vm hosts offer this?

VMware however does not intercept all cpuids. It can't because binary translation only applies to priviledged code (the kernel). VMware doesn't translate user programs and therefore cannot intercept all cpuids. This leads to the inconsistencies in applications you describe. Both Intel and AMD introduced a capability to mask some of the cpuid values to support VMware's enhanced migration but this is a far cry from completely spoofing cpuid's like kvm does.

And here I thought VMware employees were experts on how VMware software works!

You've actually run afoul of an extremely common misconception. VMware has been using VT (the same thing KVM uses) since 2005; the VMware hypervisors can run in either a binary translation mode, a VT/SVM mode, or a paravirtualized mode for Linux kernels 2.6.23 and above (or Ubuntu, who accepted the patches earlier), and do in fact switch modes depending on which guest OS, vMotion options, and other settings are configured. Configuring for a baseline CPUID value is ultimately an engineering choice: BT can only run with a passed-through CPUID, whereas VT/SVM can run either passed-through or emulated. Since the trapping overheads of most pre-EPT/NPT VT/SVM implentations are higher than the binary translation overheads, it's more efficient to run in BT mode (but VT mode is still very much supported). Thus, VMware defaults to not spoofing CPUID for a small performance win. For KVM, VT is the only option and adding the additional CPUID is a much lower marginal cost, so it makes engineering sense to always spoof. And both VMware and KVM folks are looking forward to the EPT/NPT future where VT overheads finally become lower than binary translation overheads.

Why isn't the same true for cross vendor CPU migration? I can see some obvious issues around sysenter in compatibility mode, some of the bit set instructions and FPU approximation series but none of those seem insurmountable technical challenges.

It's not insurmountable. See this VMware customer, who tweaked the vmotion compatibility settings enough to get Intel/AMD VMotions working two months ago. There's a world of difference between somebody doing this for fun / in RedHat's research lab and somebody calling this stable enough to use for production servers, however. Does VMware support it in that the software can be made to do it? Yes. Does VMware support it in that tech support will answer the phone if you break something trying this? No.

Declaration: VMware support engineering here, but speaking strictly on my own behalf. The stability issues are justified if you consider all types of VMs. Windows 2003, default RHEL5 kernels etc use more than the basic set of assembler instructions (disk IO code uses MMX, SSE etc). We can compile a kernel for strictly 486 CPUs and demonstrate migrations between AMD and Intel using extensive CPU masking: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1993 We've also known that mismatched CPU stepping makes the VMs unstable. This is because instructions suddenly run faster or slower compared to the front side bus, not all of Linux and Microsoft code has been tested against that. You can happily try it and a lot of our customers succesfully do. Some get BSODs and kernel oops. This is not our fault. If you virtualize the instructions more (bochs?) you can of course move the VM anywhere including a Linksys router's MIPS chip. At the cost of speed of course. Lastly, why would we want to keep customers stuck to one CPU vendor? We've software vendors.

The question is why would your company say it's impossible when it isn't?

...and again use another tool to power down unneeded compute capacity.

And that other tool is ... VMware! DPM (distributed power management) is built right in, and does exactly what you describe.

http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/vc/drs.html (scroll to the bottom)

Welcome to the virtual world...

Yup, the game is officially changed.

Because I don't have a Vista reinstall CD or even a restoration partition. Dell didn't provide one. If VMWare fscks up my existing Vista install then I'd have a problem.

You can copy your existing system, make sure it works under VMWare, then remove the original Vista partition.
http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/overview.html says "Clone and backup physical machines to virtual machines as part of your disaster recovery plan." In other words, you can leave your existing partition as-is.

Besides, what if MS Office messes up your existing Vista install? What if Vista itself does? You need a regular backup system regardless of OS, virtualization, or installed applications.

P.S. Have you tried calling Dell for a restore CD?

Sounds like Microsoft is again trying to jump on the wave created a competitor: http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vcloud_vmworld08.html

I've had a look at Bluelock http://bluelock.com/ and what they're doing with VMWare's cloud technology may be the difference you're looking for. VMware is extending a virtual cloud to any datacenter running VMware - that's a pretty fascinating approach that could put the big boys on their heels! http://vmware.com/cloud

Yes, there are many vendors participating in the VMware cloud concept.

The Virtual Datacenter OS and the vCloud idea really does look interesting. If you can find that keynote online, it may be worth watching. They gave a live demo.

http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vcloud_vmworld08.html

http://www.vmware.com/technology/virtual-datacenter-os/cloud-vservices/

Yes, there are many vendors participating in the VMware cloud concept.

The Virtual Datacenter OS and the vCloud idea really does look interesting. If you can find that keynote online, it may be worth watching. They gave a live demo.

http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vcloud_vmworld08.html

http://www.vmware.com/technology/virtual-datacenter-os/cloud-vservices/