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VMware Releases Server 1.0
epit writes "VMware has released v1.0 of their VMware Server product for free (as in beer) as planned. Up until now, it had been a beta download. You can download your copy via the VMware website. Release notes are also available."
I wonder if there is any concidence between this and Virtual PC 04/07 being released free. Hrmm...
Our corporation has been using VMWare Server ESX for the past 2 years and it is great. Instead of having 5 servers in a rack, you can buy 1 beefy server and just have everything in a VM. But lets say your servers are mission critical and you are worried about a hardware failure on that 1 server. If you use VMotion you can have redundant servers, so if your main VMWare server box fails, the 2nd backup VMWare server automatically picks up where the other left off, you dont even notice that the virtual machine switched servers - it works that good. Seriously, VMWare is awesome.
welcome our new virtualized overlords and their free gifts.
(Sorry, it had to be said.)
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
Check out Virtual Appliances. Basically, there are people who've already fully configured environments in a virtual machine so you can just pick up the free (as in beer) VMWare Player product and run them.
Why would you want to do that? I use a virtual machine to browse the Web - that way, my computer doesn't get bogged down by spyware (only the virtual machine does) and it's much more painless to simply purge a spyware-ridden virtual machine and start afresh than it is for your main computer.
As someone that develops, it is an amazing tool. Right now I want to test load balancing for my web application to ensure everything works correctly. I can setup a load balancing cluster, install it all, then throw requests at it all on my PC. It allows me to purchase no new hardware, no new software, and ensure that I am getting the results I desire.
While it doesn't allow me to stress test, it does allow me to test other aspects.
Plus i can install every OS/Browser combination I need and I only need to worry about diskspace. Plus, once you create the images, you never have to reinstall the OS, you just clone it. Awesome piece of software.
If you have an application that is not memory or cpu intensive, but it doesn't work well with others - this works very well. Even if it does work well with others, it helps you to really put it by itself. This is partly useful for troubleshooting, but it means when you call a company for support they can't really point their fingers at anyone else because their product is the only thing installed.
It is also useful for things like clustered file servers. They don't take up much cpu/memory, but if you put two (or more) of them out there on a VM box you can roll them back and forth for patches, updates, adding drives, etc.
It also helps for disaster recovery. You can do the equivalent of a bare metal restore in a few minutes versus loading a machine from scratch, loading drivers, loading your backup software and then restoring.
So multiple answers - and I'm sure there are many more that I haven't listed.
What seems to be missing is good reasons for using a VM at home. I can think of several:
1) Seems a lot easier than dual-booting (for those of us with SO's who aren't comfortable with Linux)
2) Makes a good home lab for what is rapidly becoming another standard tool of the IT trade
3) Hardware speeds are approaching the level where (except for gaming and certain compute-intensive applications) most home machines are quite powerful enough to run multiple partitions without the user even noticing a slowdown.
4) Shiney!
5) Free (as in beer)!
Feel free to add to this list - it's a long way from being complete.
Incidentally, I wonder if Windows Vista will run under VM? I'm guessing yes (as anything else would mean that Microsoft is cutting their own throat).
"Searching for pr0n and warez in a virtual machine and whack it when I'm done."
Thanks for sharing that.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I recently left a position where we were using ESX server to host mail (Lotus Notes under Linux) for around 10k users along with Notes application servers, and other Linux and Windows utility servers.
:)
ESX was great because it allows for much more efficient use of Server hardware. In a lot of cases we had applications running on seperate servers because the apps were unstable. Without VMWare that means seperate hardware (usually racks filled with shelves and desktop PCs if the company is cheap, or 1U servers if they're not) and all the administrative overhead of dealing with those servers. We had 30-40 VMs running inside 12 physical servers including heavily used primary and failover mail servers.
Running inside a VM gives you advantages if you're running a lights out data center, or if your servers are at a remote location. Many has been the time where a server hung and I needed someone on-site to power cycle it - with VMWare you can power cycle the VMs from anywhere, and I've never seen ESX take a dive (supposedly there's a purple screen of death, but I've never seen it)
Another advantage is backup/disaster recover planning. With a VM, your whole server is just a couple files. You can copy those files to a remote location via a variety of means, and boom, you have an off-site clone of your server. More importantly the VMs are hardware independent - you can have a datacenter filled with Dell 6850s burn to the ground and when you power up your VMs in a colo facility running HPs, the VMs don't care about there being different RAID cards, or NICs with the wrong MAC addresses.
This post was made on a Dell D620 running ubuntu with VMWare workstation on top hosting a windows VM for when I need to do windows stuff
Fsck the millennium, we want it now.
Millennium Crisis Line: 0890 900 2000 [calls cost 50p/min]
I think VMware realise that there are a lot of free virtualisation products out there, and so they had a choice of entering the free market or slowly dying out - something like Novell, Corel, Netscape etc.
Once we all get used to virtualisation, then the big companies that will start using this and see the benefits will buy the big, expensive ESX Server product.. and the support, and the tools and add-ons. For the rest of us, we get free toys so everyone's happy.
Xen is a different product, its a virtualisation tool, but it allows you to split 1 OS into several running 'instances'. VMWare is a 'wrapper' that allows you to run several different OSes side by side. Which one you'd go for depends on your requirements.
Those are seperate systems. There are virtualization applications (VMware, VirtualPC) which run as applications and will emulate an entire computer as the program so you can install a fresh OS on top of it and run it in its own little happy sandbox. There are also programs such as wine, crossover, etc, which emulate windows from inside *nix, so they give you the nessecery dll files and hooks to be able to run Windows binaries on unix-based systems. So if you wanted to play Everquest/Wow/Civ4 from your Linux box you would use Wine. If you wanted to run a Linux server for testing from your Windows box you would use VMware.
Be aware that you need a legitimate license/key to install/activate Windows XP; after a P2V (physical-to-virtual) conversion of a WinXP box, I had to make the obligatory call to Microsoft and promise that I didn't have -that-version- of XP installed on any other system.
Otherwise, I'd suggest just downloading VMware Server, and playing with it for a while. The first time you see the POST (power-on self test) and BIOS screens of the VM it's like you've stepped into another dimension; your mind reels at the possibilities. Tiny servers for all sorts of DNS/LDAP/SAMBA bits. Honeypots. Network IDS. Cookieless web browsing. Knoppix instances for whatever you can think of. It's endless.
Nuggets: The virtual machine shares (by default) the CD drive of the host; but you can point to an .ISO file instead. You can point the drive to a REMOTE drive, of someone who's connected in through the virtual console, so they (the remote end) can have the CD they need to install from in their hands, instead of in the host's CD drive. Same with floppies. The network bits are similar; a private net, a NAT'ed net, or a bridged net. Whatever you need.
Just install it. Let the possibilities wash over you.
\harv
--
How does this sig thing work?
Xen doesn't split "1 OS into several running 'instances'" (which is what Solaris's containers or Linux's VServer or FreeBSD's jails do). Xen vitalizes all OSes that are run (except the Dom0 OS is allowed to tell the hypervisor what to do) which is very similar to how VMware ESX server works. Xen also provides many of the same features that the VMware product family provides (like live migration).
VMWare Server is a server so the VMs running on it are accessible from other machines by running a client tool. With Workstation and Player you can only access and use the VMs from the machine they are running on - no remote connectivity (unless you run a client connectivity tool like VNC fom within the VM). Workstation is more sophisticated (mutiple snapshot capablitities, VM Teams, etc) with the exception that the VMs cannot be accessed remotely.
> The popularity of VM solutions is a damning indictment of the OS environment, scheduling and multi user memory protection capabilitie of Windows.
Just have to get your digs in on Windows, don't you? So what about those people that like to virtualize Linux? Does Linux automatically suck too?
Or just maybe there's reasons that go beyond stability.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
This is total BS. Their license agreement has never said that, and as a matter of fact, their FAQ makes it pretty clear:
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon