Slashdot Mirror
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."
VMWare does on-the-demand binary translation (BT) to avoid traps. I could be wrong, but I don't think Microsoft Virtual Server does BT.
Its also awesome that VMWare Server is available free to download. I installed it on my laptop running Ubuntu and can run Windows XP.
http://www.vmware.com/download/server/
Help me/us countryfolk understand: So if you get a BSOD in a virtual environemnt, are you dead or not? I imagine that with some of the Windows hardware hooks, you'd probably be dead anyhow, so it wouldn't matter if you were virtually dead or really dead.
stuff |
It's mostly anecdotal, but I work at a Microsoft shop, and several developers still clamor for VMWare even though we have Virtual Server for free, as it seems to be a lot better performance-wise.
I'm still waiting for an update to Virtual PC, there the difference is abysmal.
Also, would it be possible to emulate some other hardware? The current video card emulated by Virtual PC won't support Aero.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Actually I was able to use the free VMWare player on XP and install Ubuntu 6.06 (http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/5 59), which is one of the Virtual Appliances available on the VMWare site. It was pretty cool.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
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.
Ya I know I went overboard :)
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
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.
The quick and dirty virtualisation is with the Linux-for-Windows Screensaver; screenshot here
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.
--
make install -not war
I installed VMWare on my Dell laptop, created a 30GB partition (of which 20GB is MP3/M4P), installed the Dell XP Pro OEM version in VMWare, which automatically picked up the system's XP key, and I got iTunes running in VMWare, Office 2003 for historical mail and the odd Word/Powerpoint/Excel documents which OpenOffice 2 has difficulties handling.
I guess the ironic part here is that I had to install an antivirus program on a laptop running Linux, but now that Evolution gets along just fine with the company's Exchange 2003 server (even the calendar entries shows up - I am impressed at how good it actually is!), I am in general a much happier human being running Linux, and I have the best of both worlds (depending on your point of view) being able to run iTunes and Office 2003 on my Linux laptop!
I have tested Virtual PC, Virtual Server and VMWare Server and VMWare Workstation for our testing environment, and it seems MS is more flexible in a way: you can easily copy a Virtual Machine from one computer to an other even if they have different hardware. With VMWare workstation, i had strange problems.
I didn't have any of those problems using VMWare Server, but the web interface of MS VServer was really more usefull for our build machines, test environments and portability too.
BUT, MS doesn't support x64 Guest Environment... so even though we have mostly a MS environment (using VirtualServer), we had to use a couple of VMWare Server machines to use WinXP x64...
I wouldn't mind you in my head, if you weren't so clearly mad -Lews Therin Telamon
Whoever came up with this has never tried to install DB2 in VMWare. Good luck with that.
Adventure City Tours
Honestly, we're quite happy with VI3, but we need 3.0.1, due in October. There are a few honestly quite stupid bugs in 3.0 that need to be attended to. The most aggravating part is the license server (based on flexlm, which is usually not so bad). Licensing is the one thing where VMware is going backwards on (although the COST of licensing is quite good now).
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
IBM's Virtual Machine (VM) is decades ahead of VMWare. It was first available in 1966. It's reliability, scalability, features, and more; have been enhanced since its beginnings, it is trusted by the most data and reliability sensitive companies and corporations in the world. It isn't just a hypervisor like VMWare or Microsoft's Virtual Suite--it's a full fledged operating system.
It bothers me to watch those whom praise this or that without knowing more about it. Yes, VMWare is good, especially for the PC. However, don't lose sight of superior advancements we've already made in the name of hype and evangelism.
I have been a VMWare user for a few years now, as well as MS virtual PC, and tinkered with MS Virtual Server for some time... So far, the utilities i have found for VMWare have been very useful and havent found any for MS products, though i really havent looked. I found this product called MakeVM last week or so. It runs on a live windows box and clones straight to a VMware Virtual Hard drive, over network.
so far i have used this on 4 legacy machines, and moved them straight to my VMWare host running on linux with samba, and had them all cloned and running in 2 days with no downtime. could have been less since i waste alot of time readin these articles..
then i came across this utility diskmount to map drives to virtual disks in the event that i need to do so, which has been rather handy...
I use the free version on windows in my office for testing, on my windows and linux servers, at home on Ubunutu, and never had a problem with it with any guest OS. In addition, the fact that i can boot a guest OS directly from my windows hard drive through my Ubuntu session gives it extra points since i never have to reboot my computer
VMWare is definitely the product i am sticking with...