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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"
If you are going to list software that will let you run an operating system from within another don't leave out qemu ahref=http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/rel=url2 html-2228http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/>
Qemu may not run as fast as vmware does now but it's here, it's free and you can change whatever you want about it. The same is not true for vmware
http://nyamenation.org/
So where can I find this free beer everyone keeps talking about?
I bet this is more because og Mircrosoft than Xen. When Mircrosoft is moving into a field competitors usally shiver....
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.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
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.
To play devils advocate here, why isn't VMWare resorting to patents to muscle out the competition? Why compete when a government monopoly can take care of competition for you?
Are all their patents pending?
May the Maths Be with you!
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 haven't compared them 1 to 1, but I would expect that GSX has higher requirements for your server, both memory and CPU wise. If that is not the case, you're absolutely right - GSX is all I'm going to need. One more positive side is that open sourcing GSX may trigger few separate public projects based on it (depends on what license GSX sources will be provided under).
Doesn't TFA say they are "expected" to make their product free?
expected != will
This is all news.com.com.com.com speculation. In TFA they state: "VMware may gain two advantages from the move..." blablabla "VMware didn't immediately respond to requests for comment."
So the title "VMware to Make Server Product Free (as in beer)" is misleading at best.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
. . . of much commercial value for long, given that the model of computing is headed for a TCPA/Palladium/Remote attestation/Client assurance/DRM lockdown. Emulating "trusted" computing would defeat the whole purpose of the "content" and computing industries' march towards that model. That, and they'll buy laws making even attempting such emulation punishable by just short of death.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
q[One more positive side is that open sourcing GSX may trigger few separate public projects based on it (depends on what license GSX sources will be provided under).]q
It's provided under the "here are the binaries; you may not reverse engineer them" license.
Read the topic again -- free as in beer, not free as in speech. Just because I give you the beer for free doesn't mean I have to provide you the recipe.
It is free as in beer, not as in speech. The source will not be opened from what the article says.
What is it with this "Related Stories" thing? Is that new, or why did I never notice it before?
:)
And most importantly: Will it also list the dupes?
The free product will be called VMware Server, not GSX. I am not sure if they will continue with GSX as a separate product, but I was under the impression that they will. I had initially heard about this here.
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.
Sure you can. Take a gander at http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000153064739/
What you don't get with VMware player is the nifty GUI to help you with the setup.
According to the Data Sheets found here:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/gsx_specs.pdf
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/ws_specs.pdf
GSX requires a "server" host, while Workstation does not:
GSX:
Workstation:
-Jim Barr
http://jimstips.com/
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Multiple Snapshots. GSX Does not have them, workstation does. and let me tell you, It's damn nice.
"In a world without walls and fences, who needs Windows and Gates?"
I use a combination of them as well to run Linux on my windows box. If you use qemu to create the image file in vmware format you can then setup any vmplayer file to run any operating system. Currently I have the following image files, Ubuntu (Breezy), Ubuntu (Dapper), Windows 2003 Server, Debian, and BSD. All files were created first in qemu then I installed through VMPlayer. Runs as well as an official VM Player file available for download. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VMwarePlayerAndQemu for more information.
As the parent says, Workstation lets you keep a practically unlimited tree of snapshots, which is great for testing. Server can only take a single snapshot. (Sure, it can be copied and stashed somewhere manually, but the Workstation interface is much nicer and the incremental shapshots more efficient.)
I've successfully used GSX in XP. It doesn't even tell you that your OS is unsupported when you install it.
I use virtualization a lot, both at work and for for personal needs. I have got about 20 disk images, and my work typically requires me to run 2 or 3 virtual machines concurrently. Three or 4 years ago, I was using VMWare because it was basically the only product that worked well at the time. However I have switched to Qemu since then, because IMHO it is technically superior. Here is why:
The only feature I would like to see implemented in Qemu is the one allowing you to make real USB devices available to guest OSes. But anyway VMWare has so many disadvantages (see above) that for me it's a clear no-go. I think people praising VMWare are maybe too close-minded and don't realize its disadvantages because they have no experience with other virtualization softwares...
What the fuck does "free as in beer" mean?
It used to be that on election day the political machines would send men out to all the bars to buy everyone beer to toast their candidate. The idea was that the free beer would lead them to vote for the guy. Since there is an implied obligation to vote their way, the beer wasn't really free. This is then contrasted (in the "free as in beer or free as in speech") to freedom of speech, which is obviously a different sort of "free". Likewise, "Live Free or Die" doesn't imply life without cost, but rather the cost of living free.
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?
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.