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VMware to Make Server Product Free (as in beer)
yahyamf writes "CNET News.com is reporting that in the face of increasing competition in the OS virtualization market VMWare is going to give away its GSX server product for free, in the hope that customers who try it will eventually migrate to the more powerful ESX server. The company recently released a free VMWare Player which could only run but not create virtual machines. The company faces competition from rival products such as SWsoft's Virtuozzo, Mircrosoft's Virtual Server, as well as open source software like Xen"
I would have thought the most scary thing facing VMware is Intel Virtualisation Technology - it makes what was previously very hard fairly simple. It also doesn't require the guest OSes to be hacked, ala Xen.
I suspect we can expect to see a huge swathe of hypervisors being released over the next few months, if only so x86 Mac users can run Windows apps!
I'd certainly be pissed off if I'd just paid $1400 for GSX only to be told this week it's free.
I've been paying for regular updates to VMWorkstation over the years, does this mean I can stop and just use the free products?
That said, it's still worth the money I've been paying.
Very exciting indeed.
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GSX does all you need. So why if GSX is free would you need workstation?
Jason.
Which leaves the even bigger question of where this all leaves Workstation?
Player makes sense... small run-only environment, embeddable, etc.
But if GSX goes free what would a pricy workstation offer?
in the hope that customers who try it will eventually migrate to the more powerful ESX server
It's not only more powerful, it's fundamentally different. It's requires a different sort of administration. Also, the usage is different. gsx wil rarely be actively used in high uptime required production environments, esx will. esx also enables functionalities such als vmotion (if you have a san that is) and will be used more often in blade server configs.
I really wonder if people will view esx as an 'upgrade' to gsx.
Seems that GSX Server does everything VMWare Workstation does, so why would anyone buy VMware Workstation, when GSX Server is free? Don't quite understand that bit...
I'm waiting for that.
It is free as in beer, not as in speech. The source will not be opened from what the article says.
Well the only major difference between GSX and workstation is that GSX allows you to control startup / shutdown of virtual machines so that they can start at windows boot, it also supports remote administration and I believe you can manage the machines through their other tools such as VirtualCentre. I don't believe there is any great difference in system requirements for GSX over Workstation.
Ultimately GSX, Workstation and player are all essentially the same technology. ESX only differs by being a custom linux distribution making it very easy to install and a web interface to control operation and a few enterprise features such as VLANS and the VMotion addons. They've also moved some of the virtual machine I/O and handling into a kernel module rather than running in userland to gain some sort of performance advantage. Rather strangely ESX seems to be slow at supporting iSCSI. Of course there are also tools to limit bandwidth and control CPU usage on individual machines, whereas with GSX and Workstation it's a free for all.
Personally after trialling VMWARE ESX and GSX I actually prefer GSX. The "grow on use" disk type available for GSX is certainly better for small single use servers, flexibility to grow and keeps image sizes down for backups. I also really miss the client CD-ROM and floppy support which again is absent from ESX. The control panel also seems quite flakey.
Personally I feel that VMWARE have got the pricing structure wrong somehow. The only way to truely consolidate is to use big machines (20-30GB RAM) the problem here is that the cost of 4GB RAM modules is rather prohibitive, then add in some server redundancy and all the VMWARE licensing fees and it doesn't make sense any more. I'd actually prefer to pay a reasonable cost per active virtual machine, that way we can keep redundant hardware and move machines around as we see fit for performance or DR purposes.
I'm quite keen for GSX to be free or cheap, it'll then make cost sense to consider a VMWare strategy.
Jason.
Yes, Qemu DOES offer virtualization. It's the purpose of its associated kernel module.
Well, even though I've used QEMU quite a while (and even wrote the first version of its Wikipedia article!), I have to say that I prefer VMware myself. For one thing it's a lot faster – very important if you need to test the next version of a Linux system right now without any delays – and I also just like the program better.
;-)
;-)
And then there's the licensing issue – while I appreciate QEMU being free and all, I don't like how the KQEMU module's proprietary software that can't be freely distributed. I'd much prefer to just have a completely proprietary solution that works than to have a half-free solution that doesn't really do much for me. Although if I knew how to write virtualization software I'd have my own solution anyway
Oh, and remember Bochs, what we used to have before QEMU? I remember spending hours just toying around with that program... ran Windows 95 pretty nicely, and before I switched to Linux it was rather nice to have a virtualization program that ran reliably on Windows 98SE.
Although now I'm a Linux user and addicted to VMware, so why should it matter?
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