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VMware "Miles Ahead" of Microsoft Virtual Server
sunshineluv7 writes, "IT managers gathered in New York City earlier this week to get advice from experts on when, why, and how to virtualize their server environments. The takeaway from the conference: if you want to run an enterprise-class virtualization platform in production today, stick with VMware." Other wise words from this conference: "Virtualization is a journey, not a project."
BSODs only crash the virtual environment, not the host machine.
So how long do you wait? I've used VMWare ESX server in production for years and more recently the scaled down VMServer and MS virtual server. ESX is quantum leaps above the current MS offerings, they are not even playing on the same field. In fact, even the free VMServer product from VM is far better then the MS virtual server product IMHO.
I have no doubt MS will improve the product and add functionality as time goes on but they are currently WAY behind and not making great strides at this time.
You can wait but you will be waiting a looong time, at least years. Keep in mind, VMWare products are improving as well.
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Although VMware appears to be better for now, will it have the same level of support and compatibility that Microsoft provides?
If you are referring to compatibility amongst MS products I suspect the answer would be yes, it will probably work great for running MS products on top of MS products. However, keeping in mind MS' contempt for their customers coupled with the fact that MS has a very very difficult time "playing fair" with any competitors, I would assume that anything other than a MS product that you try to run will fail. It will not fail miserably or refuse to install, it will just be "buggy" and MS will point the finger squarely at whatever "unsupported" OS it is that you are using. Now as far as compatibilty goes, could you elaborate what you mean there? MS is famous for not being compatible with anything (including older MS software itself). You will also want to keep in mind that VMWare has been doing this for a long time. This is Internet2 for MS -- they missed the boat big-time and are now trying to catch up.
I've used VMWare and found that you might need to change some of the install options for Redhat (or Suse for that matter) to get them to install in VMWare. A few were ACPI=off, IDE=nodma and sometimes it was just a video option and the installs worked just fine.
Where's the study/chart contrasting VMWare with Xen virtualization? Those are the two to watch - Microsoft will just copy whichever one (or features) serves MS better.
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Last time I checked, no virtualization solution supported hardware graphics acceleration. I was surprised; I didn't think it would be too hard to do using OpenGL.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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Whoever came up with this has never tried to install DB2 in VMWare. Good luck with that.
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We currently have multiple ESX 2.5 machines for our production VMs, and are testing ESX 3.0 on our development box. We also have a couple of Virtual Server 2005 R2 boxes. Right now I can tell you that in an enterprise environment, ESX wins against VS 2005 hands down. Virtual Server 2005 is NOT an enterprise level virtualization environment. However, there are some major changes coming with Longhorn's virtualization, which isn't so far in the future now. A lot of goodies are on the way, and a lot of it is baked right into the OS. Microsoft is making a MAJOR push into virtualization. Don't count them out, especially if you're a Microsoft shop. If your just getting into virtualization, my recommendation is to set up a box for each of the freebies and try them out. If nothing else, knowing both will look good on your resume.
Ok, here is why. You can run multiple versions of the same operating system to test various deployments of software. You can run various versions of various operating systems and sandbox them, as well as taking "Snapshots in time" so if you want to test out some link some friend (moron) sent you, you can snapshot your install, click..become infected...and roll back without worry.
You can also buy a decent server and actually UTILIZE it. It is better if you buy 2 or 3. That way you can run whatever OS you need (relatively) on that hardware and not have 8 or 9 servers running at 15% because the vendor of the application you are serving will not certify it running with any other piece of software on it.
You can also migrate in case of a failure, or just lift the server off the hardware without worry. Your company has HP Proliant 185s and the leases are up. They are buying 385s to replace them. You simply move the images to the new machine and start them. The process saves tons of time, uses less electricity than several boxes, and you can also do disaster recovery by backing up the images and storing them at an off site location. If a disaster takes out your data center, you fire up the copies at the co-location and are back in business.
But other than that and a few more things.......its just cool to have without any real benefit....
I know I tried three times, and failed three times to put Vista (Beta2 and RC1) on VPC and failed three times.
Well look on the bright side: You only tried three times, but you failed six times! That's a 100% net gain in results over effort. If we can find a way to harness your failure, we might be able to use you to power our cities.
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