VMWare Rolls Out Their Largest Product Release

opieum writes "VMware has launched Virtual Infrastructure 3.0 today which includes ESX 3.0 and a number of management utilities." Relatedly Jane Walker writes "SearchOpenSource has two authors that try to show why VMware ESX Server is miles ahead of Xen and Virtual Server. Discover what to watch out for when running ESX Server and how to avoid sprawl in your virtual data center."

Comments

Re: So?

[L.Bob.Rife]

As it happens, I can't always get by in my job using only free non-commercial software. Now, I have to assume that several other people here are in the same boat, and commercial software can provide value to them. Given those circumstances, I'd prefer seeing a debate about the relative merits of particular software packages, and discuss it, rather than dismissing a product because it costs money. And if slashdot happens to make a side profit, more power to them.

Benchmarks are too easily rigged.

[jd]

There are some excellent profiling products around (VTune, PAPI, DAKOTA, KOJAK, and those are just the ones I've used). Companies like VMWare probably use some form of profiling already - they'd be insane not to, as it's a great way to improve performance with little effort. Obviously, they'd be equal idiots if they published all of the stats churned out, but there are likely ways they could publish a set of general indexes or tables to show the overheads of running N OS' over M processors with P cores each, plus the cost of running some of the standard administrative functions. Because I'm talking about the low-level operation, rather than custom-made scenarios, the figures won't represent any given scenario exactly but can't be rigged by selecting a given example either. If other vendors then wanted to publish their own figures for the same matrix and functions, then people would have something to work with on comparisons.

Sure, you can probably plug the numbers into a suitably complicated equation, but it won't be linear and it won't be "obvious". The maxima won't be at the same place for different hypervisors, either. That's the point. If you use a single number benchmark, you can (almost) always find something product X does better than product Y. If you have the full behaviour of the system written out, vendors can't obscure things like that. It's good for the customer, as they can then see what product does the best with the specific characteristics they have in mind. It's also good for the vendor, because there's no pretense and no FUD (so the customers like you) and there's no denial (so the developers respect you).

Now, are ANY vendors going to do this? And I'm including Xen and VServers in this. Probably not. There are risks involved in being that transparent, plus costs. And even if the vendors all agreed it was a good idea, you think ANY of them would volunteer to go first?

This is not to diss VMWare. I respect them (as much as I respect any corporate entity) and this is just as true of the Open Source solutions. It's merely the practical reality that promoting a product through total education of the consumer is something neither party really wants. Customers want plausible denial if things don't work out, and vendors are not going to tell you to go to their competitors.