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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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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.
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.