VMware ESXi Available For Free Starting Today

Mierdaan writes "VMware's bare-metal hypervisor is available for free starting today. ESXi, which can either be installed or run from an embedded device available in certain servers, has a 32MB footprint and gives small businesses an easy way to get into the virtualization world, with easy upgrade paths to enterprise-level features such as (H)igh (A)vailability and (D)istributed (R)esource (S)cheduler. ESXi runs on most any hardware with a server-class disk controller, and previously retailed for $495. VMware is obviously shooting to prevent Microsoft's Hyper-V technology from gaining a foothold in the marketplace."

Comments

more info.

[stoolpigeon]

This zdnet blogger already gave it a spin on some commodity-like hardware (which it seems to me there might be a few here who will be so inclined) and has a nice write-up of the results as well as some good tips on how to avoid some trouble spots for those not fortunate enough to be putting this on enterprise level hardware.
 
Downloading the ISO does require creating an account with a ton of required fields - so there are a few minutes of typing involved. There is also the usual eula to agree too, which I need to go over before I do anything with the disc image I've downloaded.

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtuall first post

Re:more info.

[Kamokazi]

Pfft, don't lie to us, you're not going to read the EULA.

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to mention the key point of the hardware compatibility list: ESXi server requires, at minimum, a storage controller which is not present in anything but enterprise level machines and costs about $250 street price to upgrade a compatible server (one with PCI-X slots.)

Cliffs: Don't plan on running this on anything you have lying around the house or office, unless you happen to have a spare Dell Poweredge 1950 (the cheapest compatible hardware, retail approx $2500 for 'barebones' config.)

Re:more info.

[DaveV1.0]

Well, he could have insomnia.

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no modpoints, otherwise this would be funny... slightly... virtually... But how the heck is it OT?

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

ESXi server requires, at minimum, a storage controller which is not present in anything but enterprise level machines and costs about $250 street price to upgrade a compatible server (one with PCI-X slots.)

Really? It does? I never knew my little old P4 NAT machine under the desk with an Adaptec SCSI controller (aic7xxx) in it was such a power-house.

I guess the Broadcom 97xx (tg3) in the old Dell I've got here too is an enterprise class network interface controller. I'm all enterprise-y and I never knew it!

Or perhaps you just haven't read the hardware compatibility lists? Yeah, I guess that's more likely.

Re:more info.

[stoolpigeon]

These issues - as well as some options are discussed in the blog post that I linked. I myself cannot discuss them at depth because I just downloaded it after seeing it here at slashdot and haven't really done anything with it yet. So I didn't forget it - I just don't have anything to say about it at this time.

Re:more info.

[nabsltd]

ESX or ESXi works just fine with a bunch of plain old IDE and SATA controllers...see here for more information.

You can't put virtual machines on an IDE drive, but you can put them on SATA disks with the controllers listed at that link. You don't get RAID on any of them, though, even if they have some sort of RAID available. ESX(i) only officially supports storing VMs on RAID arrays if the disks appear to be SCSI of some sort (including SAS, or SATA on an SAS-capable controller).

You could also use Openfiler to create iSCSI targets that ESXi can use to store VMs, and Openfiler can use any storage that any modern Linux can use, including Linux software RAID. This allows you to have a VMware ESX(i) setup permanently (ESX was available as a free 90-day trial) on some pretty cheap hardware.

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

"3.9 Audit Rights. You will maintain accurate records as to your use of the Software as authorized by this Agreement, for at least two (2) years from the last day on which support and subscription services ("Services") expired for the applicable Software. VMware, or persons designated by VMware, will, at any time during the period when you are obliged to maintain such records, be entitled to inspect such records and your computing devices, in order to verify that the Software is used by you in accordance with the terms of this Agreement..."

No wonder no one wants to read the EULA.

They don't want the VMware SWAT team busting in on them to see if they're using free software in accordance with the license.

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't even need to mess with iSCSI if you don't want to: ESXi can use a plain old NFS NAS. That's not exactly a stretch.

As I've already pointed out, ESXi also runs quite happily on a bunch of bog-standard SCSI controllers like the Adaptec AIC7xxx range, so you don't even need remote storage of any kind, and certainly not an enterprise class SAN.

Re:more info.

[CrazedWalrus]

I saw this too. The way I understand it (and I'm no lawyer, but...), I am not buying support or subscription, so I'm not obligated to keep records. This seems like a piece of boilerplate that doesn't really apply to a free eval version. Is there a different way to read that that I'm missing?

Re:more info.

[gbjbaanb]

its hardly a big deal, if you don't happen to have an 'enterprise class' storage controller available then get VMware Server which should be much more appropriate for your needs (and still free).

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if YOU had read the compatibility list you would know they don't test specific controllers, they test hardware platforms from server vendors. Proceed to blow your arrogance out your ass.

Re:more info.

[mrsteveman1]

That's completely ridiculous, the EULA demands are getting unreasonable

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

If YOU knew the first thing about VMWare ESX YOU'D know that they use almost unmodified Linux drivers, and any device supported by the driver will work under ESX and ESXi just as well as it will work under Linux.

Not to mention if YOU were actually reading the thread YOU'D know that the GGP is complaining that he has to buy a $250 "Enterprise class" SAS controller and have a server with PCI-X slots in it, which is total crap. The only reason he thinks this is because the ZDNet blogger who wrote the "review" the GGP read is an idiot who has some weird fixation with SAS and totally ignores all the other available, cheaper and less troublesome storage options such as SCSI or an NFS mounted NAS.

Last but not least, you said it yourself: VMWare only support various certified platforms, but don't expect to get much support for ESXi anyway. ESXi will be fine in an enterprise setup you need a scratch server, or have a spare "supported" server lying around so you can be sure it will work. If you're expecting to throw ESXi on any old bit of whitebox crap and get enterprise quality server out of it, you're delusional. At the same time, whining that you can't setup a simple whitebox machine and run ESXi on it for your own uses because you have to buy a $250 SAS controller first is just uninformed crap.

But thanks for playing.

Re:more info.

[smooth123]

Cool I have a Dell Poweredge 1950. Yipee, Now only if I could gather all the other information needed to set this thing up....

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

Under US law? No idea.

In the EU, your rights are unexchangable and untradable, so you can agree that they could search your home and they still would not have the legal right to search your home no matter what.

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah! I have a Dell 6850 lying around, you insensitive clod :-)

I honestly and truly have a somewhat loaded Dell Poweredge 6850 in the basement. 26G of RAM and 3 out of 4 old-school Xeon MP processors @ 3.66GHz.

Needless to say, it's a major power hog and only accepts 240V AC (I used a 30 amp dryer outlet at an earlier house for 240V and now a 120-to-240 step-up transformer at this house). It does keep the basement nice and warm in the winter though...
The 6850 is actually quieter than the 1U Sun Fire v20z next to it with its high-RPM noisy fans.

The box runs CentOS with the other freebie VMWare Server product but I'll have to keep ESXi in mind. One of the things the box did was stock Asterisk for a while with a Digium card but I've moved to Sangoma with PBX In A Flash & Elastix.

Finding a used cheap 240V APC UPS was difficult but well worth it as they share the same external batteries as the more common 120V versions.

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't make sense. How can contracts possibly work? I don't have the "right" to take your money from you, so if you sign a contract saying you will give me X euros to perform a service you don't have to do it when I'm done? Obviously this is not the case, so I can only assume your understanding of the law is flawed.

Re:more info.

[Shadowruni]

Preach brother preach... I hate when the uninformed try to drop knowledge on VMWare....

Re:more info.

[segedunum]

Maybe if YOU had read the compatibility list you would know they don't test specific controllers, they test hardware platforms from server vendors.

Yer, and? Most vendors do that. That doesn't mean that it won't work on some commodity hardware you can buy though, since ummmmm, all those enterprisey systems are actually commodity hardware themselves.

I've had ESX(i) running very well on an Adaptec 2420SA SATA controller (I was thoroughly confused about the whole SAS thing) as well as some plain PC based systems. ESX(i) is basically a very thin Linux system that boots the hypervisor system on top, so all the base drivers are Linux ones. It just wouldn't make sense to start writing your own device drivers for things when ones already exist. That would be colossally expensive for VMware. Only Microsoft can afford to maintain a system like that with all the hardware support needed these days.......

Re:more info.

[mysidia]

If YOU knew the first thing about VMWare ESX YOU'D know that they use almost unmodified Linux drivers, and any device supported by the driver will work under ESX and ESXi just as well as it will work under Linux.

They used to, anyways. In ESXi 3, the service console (the Linux stuff) is supposedly removed, and there is only VMkernel, no Linux stuff.

Re:more info.

[joe_n_bloe]

Exactly what support and subscription services do you think you get for a free download? The answer being NONE, this paragraph is irrelevant.

Re:more info.

[Nazlfrag]

Any and all disparaging comments about the EULA, as per the terms of this Software Agreement, shall be kept for a minimum of at least two (2) milennia from the last day on which our Lord and Saviour ("Yahweh") expired for the applicable sins of mankind. VMware, or deities designated by VMware, will, at any time during the period when you are obliged to maintain such records, be entitled to inspect such records and your immortal soul, in order to verify that the darkest pits of the eternal pit of damnation are reserved for your treacherous malfeasance...

Re:more info.

[nabsltd]

There's got to be some "Linux stuff" in ESXi, as none of the hardware drivers are part of the vmkernel...they are all part of the kernel that started out as RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 and had some mods done by VMware (and source for all the mods is available, as per the GPL).

I think that the only real difference between ESX and ESXi is that you don't have the extra VM running as the "console", plus no web access running in userland (which reduces the memory footprint dramatically).

But, without that console, you lose a lot. For me, I have added a decent amount of software (a better NTP daemon, for one), modified the firewall rules to add services, and done some recovery when things went bad (my storage controller is technically unsupported). I would suspect you also can't transfer files to the server via sftp, and can't use scripts to maintain the VMs (like this automated backup script).

Re:more info.

[shokk]

Forms like that are why I use Roboform.

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

I know for sure that you can generally ask BSA to f... off in a lot of cases in Norway. But that doesn't make BSA powerless. They just have to do some more steps to get the police and the court on their side. This protects individuals and smaller companies from the mighty giants.

DVD-Jon did not go free without a major fight in the justice system. He won the case, but "the mighty giants" did get their fair go in the courts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvd-jon#The_DeCSS_prosecution

Re:more info.

[Mista2]

We currently have 5 dial-quadcore ESX 3.0.1 hosts attached to a SAN, two others in our DMZ which are stand-alone, and were tossing up whether to get two more. This has now made it a no brainer as previously we had to way up the cost of an ESX dual cpu licence against buying 2 or three smaller servers. Now this means we just keep buying our standard server kit with stacks of RAM and just install ESXi anyway, even if it will only be one guest. We were about to purchase a New SAN and iSCSI was on the required feature list, so we'll probaby just add iSCSI cards into the mix for standard servers, and just purchase HA and DRS licences. I've been using VMWare server at home now for over a year, and is perfect for servers which wont support ESX. I just use a console only install of Suse 10.2 as the host OS. Runs my 5 guest servers (SLES10 server for mail, iFolder server appliance downloaded from the VMare marketplace, ISPConfig for a web/dev server and OpenFiler for storage/NAS) just fine for home use on a 1.2 GHz AMD CPU with 4GB RAM.

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

If I'm not mistaken you can also put VMs on an NFS share as well.

Re:more info.

[illumin8]

If YOU knew the first thing about VMWare ESX YOU'D know that they use almost unmodified Linux drivers, and any device supported by the driver will work under ESX and ESXi just as well as it will work under Linux.

Sorry, this isn't VMware ESX server. This is their ESXi product, which doesn't use standard Linux drivers. It's more of an embedded OS. How do you think you could fit a Linux kernel, hypervisor, and drivers for all the storage devices that ESX supports in 32MB?

I also have to correct you about using unmodified Linux drivers. VMware does a pretty extensive certification process for their drivers on ESX, and they modify quite a few of them to remove bugs, increase stability and performance, etc. If you try to just hack any source tarball and compile it on ESX, you're in for a rude awakening. It probably won't work, and even if it does, it won't be supported by VMware so you're essentially running an unsupported configuration. For any production VMware system, you don't want to be unsupported, trust me.

Re:more info.

[bobcat7677]

How is the ICH7 and ICH9 controllers "Plain old"? Most everything in that list is for ESX server, the ESXi column is pretty empty. Also remember that having a compatible storage controller isn't the only issue. You also have to have bios that will work with the embedded hyper visor setup. Also of note is the big BOLD text at the top of that page explaining that soft raid is not supported so you will only be able to access individual disks on the ICH7 and 9 controllers, not an array...that will be a show stopper for anyone wanting to do anything serious with this.

Re:more info.

[ivan256]

The hardware drivers didn't run in the service console. They ran under the compatibility layer the VMware kernel used to be compatible with linux drivers.

In my experience, though, it was hit or miss whether any particular linux driver would work.

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is their ESXi product, which doesn't use standard Linux drivers. It's more of an embedded OS. How do you think you could fit a Linux kernel, hypervisor, and drivers for all the storage devices that ESX supports in 32MB?

I strongly suggest you take a closer look at ESX & ESXi before you make such comments. The hypervisor and drivers in ESXi is exactly the same as the one in the full blown ESX product. What you do not get with ESXi is the console VM, which is a modified RHEL 3 system and what takes up the extra memory and disc space in a full ESX install.

I also have to correct you about using unmodified Linux drivers. VMware does a pretty extensive certification process for their drivers on ESX, and they modify quite a few of them to remove bugs, increase stability and performance, etc

That's as maybe, but they don't remove functionality or PCI IDs from the driver tables (without a very good reason, at least), which is the point I was making: just because a generic Adaptec (or whatever) device isn't specifically listed in the HCL, that doesn't mean the aic7xxx driver in ESX[i] won't work with it.

For any production VMware system, you don't want to be unsupported, trust me.

Well dur, but then you wont be running ESXi anyway.

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, if you have not paid for the product and have not purchased support, the auditing section doesn't apply. I've forwarded this internally at VMware (I work there but am not a lawyer) and I hope something more human-readable and less enterprisey comes out for the free version. -- John Troyer

Re:more info.

[Anonymous Coward]

I SERIOUSLY hope you're kidding. If not, you are such a fucking fag... "comodity hardware" .. "read the eula" .. "reading zdnet"

Another download link

[clang_jangle]

Oh, this is going to be fun, I can hardly wait! BTW the download link in TFA appears to be broken, you can get it here.

Re:Another download link

[Anonymous Coward]

the link text is correct but the link under it has a typo (only two w's)

http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi

Re:Another download link

[Anonymous Coward]

I bow to your superior hacking skills.

Re:Another download link

[BrentH]

What I want to know is: can I use this, as a home user, use this to run Windows and Linux at the same time, /and/ play games (at full throttle) in Windows? Because I'd love to be able to run Linux full time and only load up Windows for the occasional game (without leaving Linux).

Re:Another download link

[drachenstern]

DirectX is your foe, and I too am waiting for something like this to work.

In the meantime, you really really really want to look at wine. That'll be your best bet for a quick way to do this. The only telling question is what sort of games are you wanting to switch over to WindowsXP to play in the first place? StarCraft, sure, Crysis, not.

awesome...

[teknopurge]

In our testing VMWare is by far the best performing VM platform out there, especially on the networking benchmarks. This is nothing but a good thing.

Re:awesome...

[wandazulu]

Agreed. VMware has Microsoft totally beat in terms of what you can do with virtualization. I was able to set up an environment of clustered machines for testing an Exchange Active-Active cluster and it worked flawlessly (though it did require some fiddling with the vmx files). I asked a Microsoft guy about doing something similar and they said that it wasn't possible. Frankly, VirtualPC is a joke (no unlimited snapshots? No private LAN segments? No thanks.) and without the flexibility of their server product, I can't believe Microsoft actually thinks its a contender in this space.

Basically, Microsoft is hoping to leverage their Windows monopoly to push a substandard product down everyone's throats (again).

Re:awesome...

[Richard_at_work]

Uhm, HyperV is not VirtualPC - its completely different (although it can use VirtualPC and VirtualServer images if you really want it to).

HyperV does have multiple LAN segments (with the ability to setup routing between as required) and unlimited snapshots are available as standard, to respond to both your issues.

Re:awesome...

[mitgib]

HyperV is also Xen aware. I played with it for a short period when RC1 was released, but was totally dissatisfied with it. I don't think VMWare has much to worry about as HyperV was not ready for production in my opinion at the time.

I was able to install Xen kernels in Fedora and CentOS without a problem in HyperV, but could not for the life of me get w2k3 or w2k8 to install, while both install without issue in my Xen cluster. Virtual Server 2005 was a far better product from Microsoft, but still way lacking as it required windows as the base OS.

Another lacking part I found with HyperV was poor ethernet support for *nix, limited to a realtech driver at 100Mbit. I really don't think enterprise clients will adopt HyperV for the one main reason of support though, it only officially supports SUSE, and if big enterprise clients can not purchase support for other linux distro's, they are not going to waste their time on Microsofts product.

Re:awesome...

[Richard_at_work]

I currently have HyperV running on a Dell Vostro 200 (Core 2 Duo E8300, 4GB ram), with 3 Windows 2008 and one Windows 2003 VM running full time (and under load).

I will agree that the RCs were pigs, and Windows 2008 RTM did not include the final version of HyperV - if you grabbed the right update, it worked peachly however.

HyperV RTM was released a few weeks back, and was a simple update through Windows Update - it works a *lot* better than the RCs, and has sped things up as well.

Re:awesome...

[nko321]

Microsoft essentially doesn't support their own OS if it's on a non-Microsoft virtual server:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=897615

Re:awesome...

[Znork]

What platforms did you test, and with what virtualized OS's? I've run some fairly comprehensive tests, but comparing ESX with paravirtualized Xen, Xen tends to perform as well on most benchmarks and significantly better on some (as expected, IO, system related and SMP scaling).

On fully virtual systems ESX is without a doubt the way to go tho.

Re:awesome...

[Haileri$]

So you don't sound somewhat bias right?! Virtual PC mirrors the workstation product - a poorer relation but the workstation products aren't targetted at HA server configurations really.

Consider this - Hyper-V just made ESX3i free, just the same as Virtual Server made VMWare Server (formerly GSX) free. I don't think Hyper-V is great (the lack of support for previous version service packs is appaling for example) but substandard - not for a second, it mirrored my quick 10 VM test for speed against ESX (apart from setting the bloody VM's up!)

Re:awesome...

[Tony Hoyle]

xen doesn't have virtualised DMA so it's all software copy via qemu.. that means that ethernet and hard disk both bottlneck making the performance very substandard.. about 1% of VMWare on the same hardware.

You can buy commercial drivers for it that speeds up the hard disk somewhat (nowhere near VMware speed though) but there seems to be nothing that stops the ethernet throughput sucking the bug one.

Re:awesome...

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting, in our performance testing Hyper V beat ESX by a significant margin for network and IO throughput. however VM Ware comes with more features. In the end we are going with Hyper V due to it being cheaper, VM Ware would edge it out on features but for the massive extra cost it just isn't worth it.

Re:awesome...

[Anonymous Coward]

You should not evaluate it based on the RC. The RTM version is almost on par with VM Ware and actually beats VM Ware in a lot of performance tests. After our RTM eval of it we have started converting our VM Ware base over to Hyper V, this is going to save us in excess of 2 million in VM Ware licenses and all we lose is a few features in VM Ware that we don't actually use anyway. There are a few things I don't like about Hyper-V but these are easily out weighed by the cost saving and performance, management of Hyper-V Hosts still needs some work, management and monitoring of there guests though is already better than VM Ware.

Re:awesome...

[gaspyy]

You had some credibility until you mentioned "VirtualPC". Virtual PC is for homes, maybe small offices where you need to test an older OS. I have a virtualized WinXP to test suspicious software on and generally play with without caring of consequences.

If you want to look at enterprise-level stuff, google for HyperV.

Re:awesome...

[Jellybob]

Do you have a source for that? I'm playing with Xen at the moment, and hadn't heard any mention of it.

Re:awesome...

[Night64]

In ours, Xen had the best performance. And I don't have to pay to use VM live migration, or iSCSI, FC, NFS or any kind of storage. And if I want to use some kind of "Virtual Machine Center", I have options: Citrix, Unisys, Novell... Don't you love a multi-vendor technology? Well, I do!

Re:awesome...

[wandazulu]

I understand that VirtualPC != HyperV, but my point was (something I think I worded badly) that you can do amazing things with all of VMware's products; they all share certain core tech that allows their Workstation product, analogous to VirtualPC, to have most of the features of their ESX version (similar to Hyper V). The difference is that VMware is, IMHO, much much more powerful across the board than Microsoft's offerings.

Re:awesome...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hyper-V works well for me and I find it much better and faster than VMware Server and Virtual Server 2005.

advertising

[conspirator57]

slashdot apparently is a guerrilla marketing site. Who knew?

How about some objective analysis, or a couple of links to blogs like in the first comment?

Re:advertising

[gEvil (beta)]

slashdot apparently is a guerrilla marketing site. Who knew?

*raises hand*

Re:advertising

[grajzor]

Talking to yourself again, Steve? *ducks for chair*

Re:Not FREE

[clang_jangle]

If it's not FREE (as in GPL v3), it's not FREE.

Maybe that's why TFS said "free", rather than "FREE"?

wrong name

[Anonymous Coward]

The ad got the product name wrong, it's suppose to be iESX.

Re:wrong name

[gEvil (beta)]

The ad got the product name wrong, it's suppose to be iESX.

They should've just called it VMware SEXi. "I need to go fiddle with the SEXi server."

Re:wrong name

[74nova]

I thought it was iSEX, maybe a new...Apple ummm...nevermind

Re:wrong name

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually no, it's ESX 3i. You lose.

Re:wrong name

[Anonymous Coward]

vibrator? the ideal present from him to her.

Re:wrong name

[GroovyTrucker]

Then we would have the enterprise-level feature (H)igh (A)vailability and (R)esource (D)istributed (S)cheduler *HARDS*.

That acronym makes no sense *whatsoever*, not like the original summary...

Take Billy to see the D-O-C-T-O-R.

[Anonymous Coward]

(H)igh (A)vailability and (D)istributed (R)esource (S)cheduler.

And just in case you couldn't tell that we're spelling out an abbreviation, not only have we capitalized the letters, we've added parentheses around each one as well!

The First One is Free, Kid

[SuperBanana]

Don't mind the $2500 per-physical-machine-maximum-2-cpus price tag on the version which actually lets you do stuff, like manage the machines, migrate them, share storage, etc.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[Bandman]

This isn't a smart-assed comment, but what does this version do?

I've got an enclosure of 10 PowerEdge 1955s that I have ~ 6months to play with until I need to make them production servers. I'm sorely tempted to use this, but I'm unfamiliar with the ESX product line. What does this ESXi do for me?

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[Anonymous Coward]

And well worth it, I might add. It is a proven enterprise level technology and it really will save you money right out of the gate. I'm running 20 Windows Server 2003 boxen on a single HP DL385 G3 with 2 AMD 2218's and 16GB RAM, and I'm still only running at about 60-70% utilization.

For the standard version of Virtual Infrastructure you're going to spend around $2500-$6000, plus around $5000-$10000 for 1 or 2 servers to run it.

Again, worth it.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[Vrtigo1]

Google is your friend.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[Anonymous Coward]

> like manage the machines

From what I have seen, it does come with a remote client (which can be downloaded from the machine itself) to manage the machine.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[SydShamino]

As a VMware stock holder, that sounds fine with me.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[JayGuerette]

Don't mind the $2500 per-physical-machine-maximum-2-cpus price tag on the version which actually lets you do stuff, like manage the machines, migrate them, share storage, etc.

When you're running 10-20 virtual servers on a single ESX host and look at the hardware cost, space & resource consumption, and management costs of 10-20 physical servers.... this suddenly looks cheap. We're running 100+ ESX hosts... this is an *extremely* cost-effective solution.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[hal9000(jr)]

You can find a FAQ.

I haven't looked at ESXi in depth. The biggest missing component I see is the lack of a service console--no command line. I have a few Dell 2550(?) that for some reason have CDrom issues that I need console access for.

It looks like you have plenty of time to install ESXi and play with it. As long as your virtual servers aren't resource hogs, you can save bundles in hardware. If you step up to ESX and Virtual Ifrastructure, you can manage all your VM's through a single server. You can move, with VMotion VM's from one hypervisor to another (running, if they are using the same SAN), take snapshots (and restore!) of running machines live. virtualizaiton makes your life so much easier.

Guess I am a bit of a fan-boi.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[jimicus]

This isn't a smart-assed comment, but what does this version do?

I've got an enclosure of 10 PowerEdge 1955s that I have ~ 6months to play with until I need to make them production servers. I'm sorely tempted to use this, but I'm unfamiliar with the ESX product line. What does this ESXi do for me?

Not sure I follow you.

Virtualisation is very well covered in Wikipedia and I won't waste time explaining it again now.

This offers a few features which are absent from VMWare Server:

1. Runs directly on bare metal. So you have to dedicate less disk space to a full-blown OS.
2. Should perform better.
3. Easy upgrade path to the paid version. The paid version is where things get really interesting - for instance, you can set up high-availability on a per-VM basis, effectively bringing HA to applications which don't natively have any sort of HA support.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[Anonymous Coward]

The $2500 is a one time charge, not per-physical-machine.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[nabsltd]

I'm running 20 Windows Server 2003 boxen on a single HP DL385 G3 with 2 AMD 2218's and 16GB RAM, and I'm still only running at about 60-70% utilization.

For the standard version of Virtual Infrastructure you're going to spend around $2500-$6000, plus around $5000-$10000 for 1 or 2 servers to run it.

Although there is no getting around the cost of VI from VMware, the only thing that's really expensive is storage for all the VMs you need to run, and the outrageous markup on the servers on the VMware HCL.

If you "white box" with all VMware-certified hardware, you can build a very nice server (two quad-core 2GHz AMD, 16GB ECC RAM, 6 1-Gbit NICs, PCIe SAS RAID) for less than $3000. But once you start talking SAN, then you start to have very few choices but to pay the outrageous prices.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[mrsteveman1]

it was until it stole my girlfriend and put those photos we took up on Google Images..oh man i shoulda seen that coming

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[Anonymous Coward]

outrageous markup on the servers on the VMware HCL.

Really? Plain regular 2U rackmount servers from dell (like the poweredge 2950) are priced competitively with ibm, hp and other major vendors.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[nabsltd]

Really? Plain regular 2U rackmount servers from dell (like the poweredge 2950) are priced competitively with ibm, hp and other major vendors.

So, what you're saying is that they all have outrageous markups? ;->

Really, try and outfit a machine with 8 cores at 2GHz, 16GB of RAM (with room for 48GB more), six 1-Gbit NICs, and an 8-port SATA RAID controller with three 500GB drives (and room for 5 more), and two PCIe x4 slots unused (for future expansion) for less than $4,000 at any of the major vendors. You can white box that machine with VMware HCL list hardware for less than $2500.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[Allador]

You're implying that there's no value in the ESXi product by itself, without purchasing VI3 as well.

This is absolutely not true.

There is a HUGE potential market of smaller businesses and one-off situations where people dont need to manage more than 1 or 2 of these ESXi installs.

They're not using them for disaster recovery, just to get a bunch of machines running on one set of hardware.

From that target's point of view, this is huge. Because now you dont have to run a full-fledged OS underneat the virtualization (ie, Virtual Server, formerly known as GSX).

I mean, theoretically (drivers and controllers permitting), you could have your desktops or laptops running Windows (no directx, so only good for business ue) AND Linux at the same time, both running on top of the bare-metal ESXi.

This is really a huge thing, and I can see several clients of ours that could use this right now, and the lack of free VI3 doesnt bother me in the least.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[Allador]

It's not always that simple. With a white box (at least all the ones I've seen) you dont get a nice BMC or ILO card, you dont get hot-swappable dual redundant power supplies, you dont get a nice turnkey hardware management software that will alert you if something starts to go (you can do it, but its all home-grown work, with hp/dell its turnkey). You dont get a well-engineered airflow/cooling in a slick 2u rackmount. You generally dont get a mchine that is as maintainable without tools, or as well engineered internally.

What are the motherboards and chipsets your getting with the whitebox? Sometimes they're the same (vanilla intel), sometimes not.

What kind of automated driver/bios/flash update tools do you get with your whitebox?

Yes, you can white box your servers for cheaper, but its not like you dont get anything in return for the premium.

You build whitebox when you have to, due to funds, or when you're building in such volume that the premium really becomes material.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[Koutarou]

But once you start talking SAN, then you start to have very few choices but to pay the outrageous prices.

Or whitebox-thumper the SAN with Solaris, ZFS volumes, iSCSI target and multiple gbe interfaces using LACP/PAGP.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[Corporate Troll]

Pictures, or it didn't happen! ;-)

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[drachenstern]

Sure there's a huge market for SMBs to run one server and have multiple subs, but most people can't use the CLI in the first place to get ESXi up and running when it falls over. How many SMBs do you know that can CLI effectively?

I see where you're going, and it's more about consultancy than anything else, and I agree with you there, but I think you see my point. VMWare Server is more targeted to the SMB, and if you're smart, you'll use something like Debian (or insert favorite *nix platform here) to host the system in the first place, with X fully installed and configured (with either Gnome or KDE, makes no difference to me)

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[nabsltd]

It's not always that simple. With a white box (at least all the ones I've seen) you dont get a nice BMC or ILO card, you dont get hot-swappable dual redundant power supplies, you dont get a nice turnkey hardware management software that will alert you if something starts to go (you can do it, but its all home-grown work, with hp/dell its turnkey).

You dont get a well-engineered airflow/cooling in a slick 2u rackmount. You generally dont get a mchine that is as maintainable without tools, or as well engineered internally.

I didn't buy the management cards for my motherboards because I didn't need them, and price comparisons I did were without them. Plus, based on the Dells we have at work, their "alerting" leaves much to be desired...a hard drive in a RAID-5 array was failed for nearly 6 months with no alert, and when the 2nd drive failed and we did get an alert, it was too late. Power supplies, airflow, hot swappable drives, etc., are all functions of the box, and you can pay for that if you need it (which I mostly do).

I don't go 2U size because that doesn't allow expandability or quiet operation (you can't fit large slow-moving fans in that small of a box), and I like to keep my systems running cool and quiet. I also think it's stupid that I can get a $30 CPU cooler that keeps the processor significantly cooler and is quieter than anything Dell/HP/whoever slaps on.

As for tools, I'm not sure what this fascination is with not using tools. Every system I've seen requires a screwdriver to install the hard drives in the hot swap racks (although the racks themselves just slide in), no CPU cooler can be installed/removed without some tools, etc. Most "no tools" systems just have regular screws replaced with thumbscrews, which generally require a tool unless they are really out in the open. I can do the same thing for about $0.01/screw, and having a #2 Phillips hanging on a wall near the servers isn't really much of a problem.

There's no getting around build quality, and I do think it's silly sometimes that I'm paying over 10% of the system cost for the case and power supply for what I build, but they last forever (I've been recyling ATX-standard chassis for nearly 10 years).

What are the motherboards and chipsets your getting with the whitebox? Sometimes they're the same (vanilla intel), sometimes not.

What kind of automated driver/bios/flash update tools do you get with your whitebox?

Since this is ESX we're talking about, you have to go with motherboards on the HCL, so you really don't get much of a choice. I use AMD on Tyan and Supermicro motherboards because until Intel came out with the Yorkfield processors, you couldn't get as many cores at a good price with low power usage. Even so, the FB-DIMMs required by Intel raises the power, heat, and cost back up again.

For updates, again, this is ESX and you don't update drivers or BIOS on the bare metal unless it is critical, and if you do, the drivers (plus the automated update utility) are written by VMware, not Dell, etc. BIOS would be handled by the motherboard manufacturer, but I really don't want it automated, since such a large percentage of updates go poorly and leave the machine FUBAR.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[periol]

This is a license for the single-server version of their virtualization software. They had been selling this license for $495.

Essentially, ESXi is your OS, and you then run virtuals on top of it. ESXi provides software redundancy for your servers. If you want hardware redundancy for your ESXi installation, you need to purchase their enterprise-level products, which include a management server, VMotion (which lets you move virtuals from machine-to-machine), as well as other fun and incredibly useful tools.

Yesterday, to install ESXi on all ten machines would have cost you $4,950, and to run all 10 machines as a virtual cluster with all the bells and whistles would have cost you around $50k. Now the first option is free, but the second option is still around $50k.

Re:The First One is Free, Kid

[Allador]

Good point about 'in the ESX context'. I was thinking just in general, not purely in the context of ESX. That does limit the situation a bit, very true.

I guess though its just a cost/time tradeoff, like everything else.

In most cases, I'd rather pay a few extra hundred dollars for a machine to have someone else do all the planning, and to have them maintain a warranty stock of parts, etc.

It would have to be a large price difference to be worth it to build my own, or be working in very large quantities.

We've even periodically done price comparisons with white box builds (parts from newegg) and we usually cant match the quality for the price of Dell or HP. We can often beat the price by a little bit, but its always marginal, and its always perceived as not worth the small price diff.

But, if you keep alot of these parts on stock, and do this alot, and have some proven builds, then I could see the value. For us, though, and our clients, its just not really worth the small price diff.

Re:Not FREE

[bigstrat2003]

Yes, let's get into arguments about what free is. Cause it's not like one could successfully argue (depending on one's precise definition of free) that GPL, BSD, $0, any of that, is/is not free. Come on, man, get off your high horse.

Re:Not FREE

[Anonymous Coward]

Look buddy. If I don't have to pay for it, by definition of what I have learned "free" to be my whole life, it is free.

"Free" as in, "short for freedom" is not, and shall never be, the default value of this term in my head. When you go to the store and get a "free sample", they are talking about cost. If I were to go to McDonalds for a promotion of "Free McNugget Wednesdays", you can bet I'll have a happy little lawsuit when they actually try to charge me and claim "It is free in that you can do whatever you want with it!"

Mostany

[Anonymous Coward]

ESXi runs on most any hardware

"Almost any"? "Most -> Any"?

Replying to myself

[Bandman]

I checked out the datasheet here(PDF), and ESXi is just the small-footprint operating system on-top of which you can run multiple virtual machines.

So instead of having a fullblown Windows/Linux installation, you install this, and the smaller footprint leaves more resources for the guest OSes.

Am I right? And what is the software that you need to manage ESXi?

Re:Replying to myself

[jeffmeden]

You are right. The management software you want is Virtual Center (included as part of ESXi). The only thing you lack is the advanced management features such as automated high availability.

Re:Replying to myself

[ArsonSmith]

Am I right? And what is the software that you need to manage ESXi?

Basicly, and it's called Virtual Infrastructure.

Re:Replying to myself

[Feyr]

their ESX software is an hypervisor that you must install directly on the hardware to start with. if you want to run linux/win under it, you need to get vmware server.

ESXi seems to be ESX without the "service console" (a linux console that runs virtually that lets you manage stuff on the esx server)

to manage it you need the VI client which you can download on their site. it's the same client for all of their software (except vmware server, because it sucks)

VI client is, sadly, windows only

Re:Replying to myself

[martums]

their ESX software is an hypervisor that you must install directly on the hardware to start with. if you want to run linux/win under it, you need to get vmware server.

I disagree with the last part of what you said. The VMware Server product will let you run one or more virtual machines on top of Linux or Windows. ESXi has no underlying host OS, and is (supposed to be) a bare metal hypervisor, (god, I hate that word), allowing you to run one or more virtual machines on the bare metal, using only the hypervisor, (Without Windows or Linux booting first. The ongoing debate of whether ESX or ESXi leverages any *nix is not for me to engage in). VMware Server is a completely different product as opposed to ESX and ESXi. And now that both VMware Server and ESXi are available free, seems like VMware Server just became the red-headed stepchild.

ESX does not require VMware Server. Two separate products, now both available free of charge.

VMware Server might be a cheap alternative if you can't shell out the $300 for Workstation. The latter of which, is worth every penny.

Re:Replying to myself

[mysidia]

No, VMware Infrastructure Client is included.

Virtual Center Server is a separate product, that doesn't appear to be included.

Re:Replying to myself

[joe_n_bloe]

VI Client works fine in a Windows VM though.

Re:Replying to myself

[Anonymous Coward]

to manage it you need the VI client which you can download on their site....

VI client is, sadly, windows only

So, strictly speaking, ESXi is *NOT* OS-independent!

Re:Replying to myself

[nabsltd]

VMware Server might be a cheap alternative if you can't shell out the $300 for Workstation.

I take it you're not in the US? There are many legtimate places (e.g., NewEgg) here that sell brand new full VMware workstation for $200.

Re:Replying to myself

[Feyr]

which if you read carefully is exactly what i said.

esx and esxi are bare metal, vmware server needs an underlying os

Re:Replying to myself

[Feyr]

neither is ESX, with its 2000$ pricetag for a starter license

Re:Replying to myself

[Anonymous Coward]

I sit corrected.

Re:Replying to myself

[Courageous]

And now that both VMware Server and ESXi are available free, seems like VMware Server just became the red-headed stepchild.

Not really. VMWare Server runs with a host OS already installed. So if you have Windows on your desktop, you can install VMWare Server as an ordinary program. Not true of ESX, or ESXi.

C//

Re:Replying to myself

[0racle]

seems like VMware Server just became the red-headed stepchild

Server supports things that ESX does not, such as local SCSI passthrough, USB devices and whatnot. It also doesn't care about the underlying storage system, so you can go ahead and use any SATA controller your host OS can use. Server still has it's place and we will be staying with it.

Re:Replying to myself

[martums]

which if you read carefully is exactly what i said.
esx and esxi are bare metal, vmware server needs an underlying os

Feyr, when I read your post carefully, as you suggested...

their ESX software is an hypervisor that you must install directly on the hardware to start with. if you want to run linux/win under it, you need to get vmware server.

Please help me understand what "it" refers to here:

if you want to run linux/win under it...

The first item you mentioned was "their ESX software", which you pointed out, is a hypervisor. Your original sentence seems to suggest that if someone wants to run Windows or Linux under "it", as in "their ESX software"...

if you want to run linux/win under it [their ESX software], you need to get vmware server.

Fortunately, you were kind enough to clarify what you meant, since what you posted failed spectacularly to reflect that. If I continue to read your post carefully, as you suggested, your use of "an hypervisor" is another mistake. You also fail to capitalize. Excellent (ab)use of the English language, sir. But, at least you got some spelling right. Congrats.

Kindly spend just a bit more time proofing your own posts. Rest assured, I'll do the same.

Business Model?

[BarneyRubble]

As a user this great (at least short term), but what exactly is there business model? I want them to be around in few years time.

Re:Business Model?

[QuantumRiff]

To sell you the features that extend it, such as management, hot migration to other machines, etc. The ESXi is cool, but a very, very base product. If you start playing with it, you will want to pay for all the features that go along with ESX to manage, deploy, etc..

Re:Business Model?

[cduffy]

You mean "their" business model, not "there" business model; the latter word refers to location, while the former refers to possession.

They're VMware. They have plenty of products they charge (lots and lots of) money for; giving away low-end freebies isn't going to hurt their bottom line much, as anyone running a QA department will want to have the management tools &c. that come with the full releases, without needing a developer to write local toolage (which can be even more expensive, after opportunity cost for the staff involved is taken into account).

Re:Business Model?

[George Beech]

The business model is to get you hooked on the free ESXi version, then sell you the expensive Virtual Infrastructure package with all the really cool features, such as HA (VMotion) and DRS(automatic - if you want - resource balancing) etc.

Re:Business Model?

[BarneyRubble]

Thank you, I was completely unaware of the distinction before you pointed it out.

There does seem to be a trend in giving away their core products. They seem to have been forced into giving away vmware player as a reaction to ms giving away virtual pc. A great innovative company which I hope doesn't go under in an overzealous bid to gain market share.

Re:Business Model?

[cduffy]

I'm not overly worried about Player cutting into their marketshare; frankly, I think VMware Server poses a bigger risk in the small-customer space (though the limited snapshot support pretty much puts a ceiling on that one's use). That said, I'm presently employed by a Fortune 100, and we're perfectly happy to pay for VMware ESX -- which is what they're trying to leverage customers of lower-end products towards anyhow.

For the moment, virtualization software has a substantial lock-in effect; the APIs for doing automation for Xen, VMware and VirtualBox (for instance) are quite far from being compatible with each other (and VirtualBox and VMware go as far as having their own proprietary container formats). As such, a company developing internal automated testing software wants to target a dominant environment (so as to avoid needing to rework this infrastructure later). However, folks like Red Hat are sponsoring libvirt to provide a way for Xen, KVM and other supported backends (which should include VMware at some point) to share a single set of management infrastructure, making the network effect weaker -- so getting mindshare now should provide a hedge against commoditization later.

Personally, I'm thoroughly in favor of Red Hat's bid to open up virtualization; VMware has done good research (and turned a good profit) in the past, but letting them (or anyone) rest on their laurels in the future is suboptimal for society as a whole; if VMware's products remain thoroughly superior (which they may well do -- see their recent research into record-and-replay), let them continue to compete effectively in an environment where switching virtualization product backends is a trivial affair.

Re:Business Model?

[petermgreen]

Afaict thier buisness model is to give away the stuff you can get for free elsewhere in the hope of tempting you to upgrade to a version with more features.

I think vmware is going to strugle long term though. As MS and FOSS keep uppping the features I think vmware will strugle to find features that people are willing to pay for.

Re:Business Model?

[drachenstern]

Couple of things:
VMW and VB can use the same vHDs, so unless you're talking about the snotty little text file that you can manipulate in nano faster than through the interface, that's just rather gauche to say that they don't use the same containers (I seem to recall that it's totally programmable if one person has already done it and given you their input and their performance. Sure the mechanics may be slightly different, but that's just semantics at this point when you're talking about a front end). Now when you compare native formats, sure, quite different.

As for the switching virtualization back ends, that's the whole point to VMWare's VI, duh. If they were to find a way to let you use someone else's backend and still make $10k/pop, sure, why not, but currently it's their backend that makes them money.

Re:Business Model?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually isn't it "it's business model"? Technically, I think referring to a company using plural is incorrect.

Re:Business Model?

[cduffy]

VMW and VB can use the same vHDs, so unless you're talking about the snotty little text file that you can manipulate in nano faster than through the interface, that's just rather gauche to say that they don't use the same containers

The native formats were all I was aware of; my bad. (I'm mostly working with libvirt+kvm right now, with vbox for my desktop, and vbox's lack of support for raw disk images in favor of its VDIs is something I found thoroughly annoying).

As for the switching virtualization back ends, that's the whole point to VMWare's VI, duh. If they were to find a way to let you use someone else's backend and still make $10k/pop, sure, why not, but currently it's their backend that makes them money.

Portability between members of a single vendor's product line are assumed; if they didn't do that their offering would be broken. (Centralized control is of course more interesting than just portability... but an initiative like libvirt promising to allow multiple frontend vendors to offer products that can control any compliant backend has the potential to trump any single-vendor solution, particularly once the VMware driver is out).

Re:Business Model?

[mjwx]

I think vmware is going to struggle long term though. As MS and FOSS keep uppping the features I think vmware will strugle to find features that people are willing to pay for.

Actually, VMware is the current industry leader in virtualization, FOSS and MS need to do a bit of catching up to VMWare, especially Microsoft as I've used that floating piece of crap called Virtual PC and Virtual Server. I haven't seen a FOSS product that can do the kind of resource allocation and load sharing that Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3) can and MS Virtual Server sure as hell can't. VMWare haven't stopped innovating and they actually want to make it easier to switch to VMWare with things like VMware Server/Player and the VPC conversion tool.

This is a very good move for VMware in that it lowers the cost of entry for small businesses, if all you're using your current virtualization solutions for is to host VM's to cut down on the number of physical servers than ESXi is just as good as or better than VMware Server running under Linux or Windows. I'm a Sysadmin in a small business, 100 users, 24 servers (mostly white boxes) and we've been using VMware Server to consolidate these servers onto some IBM Xseries servers as most of them are web or application servers of some description and need to be kept separate (which is how we ended with a bunch of white boxes). Currently were using 2-way servers running Windows 2003 with VMware Server, Windows is by far not the best resource manager and consumes a lot of resources itself (management refuses to consider Linux despite the fact that I've shown them its faster). I dont know what ESXi's max amount of RAM is but we're putting 8 GB into 2 servers so if its more than the 4GB limit on 2K3 Standard we might be switching.

We considered switching to ESX back when we first started going down the virtualization path but it was cost prohibitive given the risk, now that it's free and we don't need the advanced features of the VMWare Virtual Infrastructure the cost of entry is low enough to justify testing. If I were in a larger organisation (500+ users) I'd definitely consider using VI3 as opposed to a Linux or Windows solution as the benefits of VI3 outweigh the cost (load sharing across physical servers, better backup solution, easier to add, remove and replace VM's, high availability by automatically start cold standby's), anything less than 500+ users and VI3 is normally not worth the cost, VMWare knows this and they are reacting in the best possible way to increase market and mind share. I made a prediction when VMware server became free that VMWare will become the leading company in IT above MS (and with MS screwing up left right and centre this is becoming easier) by 2015 and I stand by my prediction.

Re:Business Model?

[Allador]

FOSS and MS need to do a bit of catching up to VMWare, especially Microsoft as I've used that floating piece of crap called Virtual PC and Virtual Server. I haven't seen a FOSS product that can do the kind of resource allocation and load sharing that Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3) can and MS Virtual Server sure as hell can't.

FYI, the current version of the MS virtualization product is Hyper-V, and its a very very different beast than MS Virtual Server was.

Hyper-V is not bad, and they'll move it pretty fast over the next couple of years.

Mind you, I'd probably still go for VMWare most of the time, as their products are more mature, and the company has more experience.

But my point is you cant compare MS VirtualPC and MS Virtual Server with VMWare ESXi, its not the right comparison. You need to compare those two with VMWare Virtual Server (formerly GSX). Hyper-V is the right product to comapre with ESX and VI3.

Re:Business Model?

[Anonymous Coward]

vbox's lack of support for raw disk images in favor of its VDIs is something I found thoroughly annoying

qemu-img is the perfect tool for migrating disk images around. It supports almost damn near everything.

Re:Business Model?

[cduffy]

qemu-img is the perfect tool for migrating disk images around. It supports almost damn near everything.

...but not VDI.

Re:Business Model?

[drachenstern]

Two bits: What's your current host-os and virt platform? I use Debian Etch to run VMWare Server and host 32bit OS Win2k3 and WinXP clients. If you're worried about overhead, I would suggest doing something like this. The only caveat that I did that I wouldn't suggest to others is that I loaded X on my machine. Sure, it works a treat, but I did it for the next guy after me (who knows who or when that will be) so that they don't get overloaded by cli. Trust me, I agree it's a sad state of affairs when a sysadmin won't learn cli, but I'm not saying he or she won't, I'm just being proactive. Still, all-in-all I'm consuming less than 200MB RAM for Deb on my 16GB available, and I only make available to my guests 3.2G, so I've got a nudge to spare yet.

Other point: Why do you think EMC will overtake MS in the IT sector? Are you referring to application support? Last I checked they had one primary product line, and that's for hardware virtualization. As for other services, Apache has the market on web services, Oracle (and others) has the market on databases, and MS has the market on server O/S's, although IBM is starting to tackle that last one. So I don't understand fully your prediction about VMWare becoming the leading IT company above MS. Care to expound or clarify?

Re:Business Model?

[mjwx]

Current host and Guest are Win 2K3 unfortunately, I have used Debian in a demonstration to prove that it was faster and had better recourse management than windows but the PHB's threw all the usual excuses back at me about support, TCO (I know this is BS, so does my boss), our Microsoft Partnership and so on. As I said in my previous post, we evaluated ESX server but found the cost of entry too high, now the cost of entry is low and we can buy support at a later date PHB's have less to complain about

I believe that VMWare will become the most important company in IT simply because everything will become virtualized, as virtualisation technology improves and Hardware gets better it becomes trivial to have the Hypervisor layer below everything. The main driver for this is that will come from business that will see every desktop virtualised as they then don't have to worry about rebuilding physical boxes, just reload the VM, driver support becomes simpler. VMWare are attempting to position themselves in this space, releasing VMWare server and ESXi for free provides them with huge amounts of market and mind share. This is just a prediction and may not happen but I definitely see VMWare's importance increasing and Microsoft's decreasing especially if Windows 7 fails the deliver.

Re:Business Model?

[drachenstern]

Okay, I'll grant you virt is hot shit right now, and that EMC is doing some really keen things, but I also think that in the global scheme of things you have to remember the graphics workstations on which virt is not an option, as well as the entire home market. But if you're going to talk about MS losing share, so long as CEOs and CFOs are using MS at home (where virt is not so hot right now) then virt won't be the #1 in IT. Trust me, I am looking forward to virt'd desktops, in a big way. But for desktop virting, look to what Citrix is doing, lest you leave out a big name. That's a MS acq I'm waiting to see happen.

All that aside, we have a MS Partnership also, and we use the MAP to great benefit, and I got stern looks over using "that linux stuff" and "those tech toys" rather than hosting it on Win2K3 myself, but the performance is well worth the PHB-iness, so I just went ahead. My only benefit is that I'm IT for this shop, so I have a tad more leeway. More's the pity for the guy at the large shop.

ESXi and Virtual Center

[moogoogaipan]

I've heard that ESXi cannot talk to Virtual Center. Is that true?

Re:ESXi and Virtual Center

[moogoogaipan]

Just found this out: To use ESXi with VC you would need to purchase ESX Foundation Oh well, still, I'll try it w/o Virtual Center.

Re:ESXi and Virtual Center

[joe_n_bloe]

Also you can surf the web for other management applications written using the VI API. There are some out there already and I think that the release of ESXi will really accelerate this. Which is a good thing because VC could use a kick in the pants (would be good for VMware too).

BTW there is a limited built-in web management interface.

Re:ESXi and Virtual Center

[ganhawk]

ESXi does come with a client. You need to buy VC if you want to manage multiple ESXi boxes together (and/or need additional features like HA/DRS)

Re:ESXi and Virtual Center

[joe_n_bloe]

I think (as is often the case) one person is talking about Virtual Center and another is talking about VI Client ....

Re:ESXi and Virtual Center

[Anonymous Coward]

You can download the 60-day evaluation version of VirtualCenter and run that with your ESXi. Then you can make an informed decision.

I actually got my ESXi preinstalled on a USB with a Dell server. It came with the 60-day VC on a CD-ROM which I installed a couple of weeks ago. Pretty slick, even though I don't have a SAN so I can't play with Vmotion and the other high-end features.

Re:ESXi and Virtual Center

[mikelane5]

Actually you can connect to ESXi with a browser and then download the Virtual Infrastructure Client to your Windows PC and use that to manage ESXi.

VMWare Converter is also free and can be used to migrate existing virtual machines to ESXi also.

I set my ESXi server up two days ago and I am very happy with it so far :)

Here's the hardware that I used for my server:

ASRock ALIVENF6G-VSTA AM2 NVidia 6100 Motherboard
AMD Athlon X2 BE-2400 Brisbane 2.3GHz
OCZ 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (x2)
PROMISE SATA300 TX4 PCI SATA II Controller Card
Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST3250310NS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive
SeaSonic S12 II SS-330GB ATX12V 330W Power Supply
Intel 1000 Pro MT NIC

It might have been possible to get ESXi working without the Promise SATA card but for me it was just not worth the effort, as the card was $60 before shipping and tax.

You might want to choose a different motherboard - i got this one as it was micro ATX and would fit in a small case - the downside is that with the SATA card there is only room for one NIC (VMWare recommend at least 2 to keep the managament and VM traffic seperate). But what the heck the board was $50 when i got it :D

Re:Not FREE

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comparison is bogus. McDonalds is a general public place, whereas this is slashdot, and is well known to be frequented by free software geeks.

It is unfortunate that the word "free" in English has such multiple meanings. Other languages have seperate words for "free as in freedom" and "free of charge"

Technically in English, "free" has no default value. If you want to avoid ambiguity, you have to say something like "free of charge"

You are right that you may be okay just saying "free" in McDonalds, but in places where freedom is likely to be discussed, you should know better than to assume. Either use the context where possible, otherwise ask for clarification.

Re:Not FREE

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically in English, "free" has no default value. If you want to avoid ambiguity, you have to say something like "free of charge"

You mean as in "VMware ESXi Available For Free"?

Re:Not FREE

[Anonymous Coward]

If I were to go to McDonalds for a promotion of "Free McNugget Wednesdays", you can bet I'll have a happy little lawsuit when they actually try to charge me and claim "It is free in that you can do whatever you want with it!"

Yeah, I threatened to sue when the local market wanted me to pay for their so-called "Free Range Chickens".

Still no Firewire support?

[PingXao]

That's been a showstopper standing between us and vmware forever. Maybe it is finally supported, but I RTFA, then I even went and RTFWS and I couldn't find any mention of Firewire or IEEE 1394 (a or b).

Re:Still no Firewire support?

[hal9000(jr)]

I am curious, what would you need firewire support for? Are you talking firewire for servers or workstations?

Re:Still no Firewire support?

[mccabem]

There is no Firewire for servers or workstations.

There's just Firewire like there's just USB. He's talking about Firewire support in VMware like there's USB support in VMware.

-Matt

Re:Still no Firewire support?

[nabsltd]

What do you need Firewire support for?

VMware ESX is really designed for virtualization of server operating systems. Although it can run quite a few "desktop" OS versions, there is no good console system...the built-in remote console view is OK for installs, tweaks that must be done from the console, etc., but not really good enough for extensive use.

ESX does support USB connected to the ESX server, but only for use with the "ESX console VM", and you can't store other VMs on USB. Since ESXi doesn't have a console VM, even that isn't supported.

Re:Still no Firewire support?

[Anonymous Coward]

So they want firewire support so that they can hack into machines? I thought we had covered the design of firewire and how it was peer-2-peer and allows any peer to read/write any memory on other peers (and allows you to logon as administrator or change anything in RAM). That's the last piece of crap I'd want on my server.

Re:Still no Firewire support?

[rtechie]

Your solution is to migrate off Firewire. It's being discontinued. If you're using Firewire for storage, stop. It's not scalable and slower that other, cheaper, solutions.

I've been able to come up with exactly one good remaining reason to use Firewire: external sound cards/video processors. They tend to be much better at handling he I/O than USB. Such devices are only intended for LAPTOPS though, so I'm not sure how that would affect VMWare (unless you want to run VMWare on the laptops, which is almost certainly a bad idea).

Re:Still no Firewire support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? I'm honestly curious; what firewire peripherals do you need to interface with a VM? Even the USB support, while nice, is mostly useless in production, as it just means your VM is now stuck on one particular host and you're sacrificing HA.

(Nice for retarded software that still uses USB dongles though

Re:Still no Firewire support?

[drachenstern]

Why is VMWare on the laptop a bad idea? Granted, most lappy-s don't run VT (etc) enabled CPUs, so there's not really the efficiency factor, but:

I run VMs on my laptop all the time, and know several other folks who do as well. If this lead to a faster boot time overall, then I would be all for it being on most laptops. Keep a stripped version of FX3 on a stripped speedy loader, keep your *nix distro on a second VM, and your WinXPGames machine on a third, and goto town. The only question I have is if you can still DirectX on a system booted from this...

The perfect reason to run a VM on a laptop is a LoB app need. Sure, you're not going to run PS from within a VM for extended periods of time, but I'll say this, I run VisStudio from it just fine (stupid Uni classes demanding C# ... bah). I'm trying to get the office-heads to understand that if we'll just use a couple of very efficient servers, we can run nearly thinclients at each desk, that connect to a VM running on the server. You thought enterprise rollouts were easy over a network with existing hardware, think about the options to run all your workstations from one console. Too slick. I already have three or four office workers working like that, and they can't complain. They also don't have any local devices, such as scanner, but printers work fine over the network, and only a couple even use a scanner anymore.

Re:Still no Firewire support?

[Oddscurity]

I can think of a use for it: debugging something running in a virtual machine. Or if you have two mutually trusted VMs they could use it as an IPC mechanism that might outperform IP-based communications.

If you don't need it, don't provision the VM in question with a virtual firewire adapter.

That said, I have no idea what GGP wanted with 1394 support.

Re:Still no Firewire support?

[drachenstern]

Have you tried (I'm totally ignorant on this one) dd-ing the USB and loopback mounting it?

I'ld really like to know if there is someway to get around that little hiccup. The alternative I've usually seen is that they do an alternate verify, where it uses some amalgamation of hardware IDs installed on the system XOR'ed with the HD ID (like in DOS DIR C:\ -- volume serial number).

Re:Still no Firewire support?

[nutznboltz]

Eric Heck told me to use redirectors to do USB and Firewire.

Re:Still no Firewire support?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll be very careful here and post as AC, because you haven't signed an NDA.

The next version MIGHT allow you to pass through PCI devices.

It's always in the next version isn't it?

Re:Still no Firewire support?

[joe_n_bloe]

Geez, Firewire won't be vanishing anytime soon. If all you want to do is run a slow ass pocket drive there's no particular need for it. You'll like it a lot better than USB with your 4000 dpi scanner though. And your video. And multichannel (24+) audio, which really won't function over USB. And anything that needs guaranteed throughput and latency. And the option for long cable runs. And so on. Let me know when USB does this.

Re:Still no Firewire support?

[joe_n_bloe]

Oh, uh, yeah, more specifically:

As an example of Firewire audio which is definitely not intended primarily for LAPTOPS (I don't know where you came up with this), there's the eternally popular MOTU 828: http://www.motu.com/products/motuaudio/828mk3/. No one's going to be running this over USB any time soon.

For large or sustained transfers, Firewire has 2-4x the throughput of USB 2.0. Firewire 400 is almost always faster than USB 2.0 in any application even though USB 2.0 has a nominally higher speed.

Scanners that can pump out 100MB high res scans will also run faster over Firewire. Considering that a v700 is only about $600 this isn't crazy talk.

HDV is Firewire-based.

And so on.

Re:Still no Firewire support?

[joe_n_bloe]

When you say "VMware" do you mean Workstation/Fusion? Or ESX/ESXi? Workstation and Fusion work fine on laptops. 1GB of RAM is pretty much a baseline though (I have 4GB in my MBP for Fusion).

There are people who have been able to run ESX on a laptop. I don't know how complicated it was to get going though. However, what you would do with a laptop running ESX, I'm not really sure. There's certainly nothing to look at on the screen other than a command line (ESX) or a BIOS-like config screen (ESXi).

Re:Still no Firewire support?

[TheLink]

"However, what you would do with a laptop running ESX, I'm not really sure"

The usual thing you'd do with a server with low disk I/O, maybe some webservers that talk to a db server on real hardware? Laptops have low power consumption, built-in 4-6 hour UPS, built-in keyboard and display.

Damnit...

[JShadow21]

Well I just bought this a few months ago... oh well

Then you don't need it

[74nova]

If the software doesn't suit you as a solution, don't complain about it, use something else.

This new free solution is perfect for me, as I've got enterprise level stuff running virtualization with Workstation. Nobody is debating whether this is a tool to getting you stuck with VMware, because it most certainly is.

Mod parent up

[mccrew]

Sorry I don't have mod points today, I'd mod you up.

Twenty-four years have passed since the GNU project began, and still it is extremely difficult to explain one of its fundamental tenets because of the poor choice of terminology. You have to convince someone that free doesn't mean what everyone else understands it to be.

Sometimes there is great value in standing your ground, insisting that the rest of the world change to fit your vision of things. This is not one of those instances.

Re:Mod parent up

[Glonoinha]

If only there was another phrase that meant something along the lines of 'Open Source' we could use to avoid that ambiguity. Then the word 'free' could mean what everybody (even non GNU people) thinks it means, and this new phrase could mean what the GNU people are thinking (ie, 'Open Source') when they use the word 'free'.

Damned if I can come up with a catchy phrase that means 'Open Source' though ... so I guess we're stuck fumble-fcuking around with the word 'free' and alienating people away from Linux in the process.

Re:Mod parent up

[mccrew]

If only there was another phrase that meant something along the lines of 'Open Source' we could use to avoid that ambiguity.

Good point you raise. Often when the free software people are doing their hand waving, they'll say that, unlike English, other languages have separate words to differentiate between free ("gratis") and freedom ("libre"). In my opinion, it would be an easier to convince others about the value of "software libre," or perhaps "liberated software," than to have to go down the rat-hole of free speech versus free beer.

Re:Mod parent up

[petermgreen]

trouble is open source isn't exactly a brilliant term either because there is plenty of software where the source is easilly availible (either to customers or even to the general public) but under licenses that mean you can do very little with it.

Re:Mod parent up

[larry bagina]

I would prefer the word "Liberty".

Re:Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register

I'm sorry you "screwed up" using plugwash as your username, but has it not occurred to you that constantly reminding everyone that you are too inept to be trusted to do a simple, common task everyone else manages to do without a hitch might have a downside? Also, what about registering with aka-plugwash or something (if it really bothers you so much), rather than letting this failure dominate your public image? Think, kid, think!

Re:Mod parent up

[Nazlfrag]

I know! We'll call it 'Public Domain'.

Re:Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

Freedom! Freedom Fries, Liberty Software, awesome!!!

I hate you all.

Why do they even try?

[jameskojiro]

I know the VMware product is going to be 100X better than the MS-MESS that is going to get crammed down our throats. I mean can Virtual PC use your PC's USB ports, NO, can VMWARE, Yes.

Can VMware work on a small footprint, yes it can.

Can MS's product work, no it can't.

I'll bet that the MS demons will end up winning the Market share with this and VMware virtualization will end up like Novell, Kaput!

Sad, but true.

Re:Why do they even try?

[joe_n_bloe]

Yeah and you can also port VMs between ESX, Workstation, Fusion, Server, Player ....

Converter is helpful although not always necessary. (There's a version you can download for free.)

Re:Why do they even try?

[gbjbaanb]

I don't know about that. One thing the MS Markleting Machine knows is that installed base is difficult to replace (otherwise.. well, you know the rest). VMWare is the "industry leader" in virtualisation, even the place I work which is seriously pro-MS dumped Virtual PC/Server for VMware ESX back when they had to pay for it and bought a load fo licences.

I think MS will keep on fighting, will keep on giving stuff away for 'free' (all you have to do is buy a copy of Windows Server 2008 :) ) and VMware will keep on taking their lunch and giving us more stuff for free which works better, performs better, is easier to manage, and runs all OSes equally.

Re:Why do they even try?

[svallarian]

Yawn

So what version are you using? Virtual PC for DOS?

Hyper-V supports USB, no problem.

and it installs in under a 2 meg footprint

so what was your complaint again?

Re:Why do they even try?

[Allador]

You're not talking about current gen products on the MS side.

MS' current virtualization product is Hyper-V and its quite nice, especially for a 1st-gen product from MS.

MS Virtual PC and MS Virtual Server are old products that havent been updated in a couple years, and arent really relevant in comparisons with VMWare ESX (maybe with VMWare Server, but not ESX).

Hyper-V is a decent product, with lots of management tools in process.

I dont think (from what I've seen) that there is a bare-metal version of Hyper-V, but you can run a very minimal Windows 2008 Server Core as the host. It wont be as lean as VMWare ESXi, but it will be much, much more lean than running MS Virtual Server on top of Windows 2003 server.

Re:Why do they even try?

[Allador]

the place I work which is seriously pro-MS dumped Virtual PC/Server for VMware ESX back when they had to pay for it

These are not equivalent products. If you were evaluating a bare-metal hypervisor against MS Virtual Server (which requires an entire host OS to run underneath) then you werent really understanding the software you were evaluating.

MS Virtual Server is more or less in the same league as VMWare Virtual Server (formerly GSX).

Microsoft's Hyper-V is a closer match to ESX, though the way MS does their 'bare-metal' is a little different.

Re:Why do they even try?

[gbjbaanb]

ok, let me rephrase that. They dumped Virtual Server in favour of VMWare Server. Then they bought ESX to run the corporate systems, and I run a VMware Server farm for the test/dev lab.

I find the difference to be minimal - after all, both Server and ESX run virtual machines, have a interface and run on Linux (Centos for my vmservers)(and ESX is built on RedHat). From the user perspective, there's no difference - run up the VM, use it, sorted.

I think people get hung up on the 'hypervisor' word, when really its just a stripped-down OS in the first place. ESX is RedHat with extraneous services removed, probably a slimmer kernel build, a memory module installed, its own filesystem and... that's about it. VMWare server on CentOS is just about the same (though I run the VMs on ext3 fs)

I think the only substantial difference is the storage requirements as ESX is a bit more insistent on a better class of storage, whereas VMWare server will use any old filesystem. I havn't been able to compare performance as we don't run like with like... but I will soon!

Re:Why do they even try?

[Allador]

I can see what you're saying.

The reason I (and I think many in this industry) categorize them differently is the magnitude of size difference.

While ESX is just some form of slimmed down OS, its an OS that runs in a 32MB total footprint, and is optimized by people who have been doing this for a long time for its purpose.

Compared to running on a full-blown OS, the 'bare metal' approach produces vastly superior results, in my experience. If nothing else, its one less OS instance you have to manage (ie, no Host to explicitly manage).

But I can also see what you're saying. For testing purposes, we use VMWare Server quite a bit (and player on the desktops), and for that purpose, it works quite well and runs on top of a host that is providing significant services to our office.

Re:Not FREE

[FishWithAHammer]

Range Chickens? What, are these replacing clay pigeons?

Does this mean...

[Thelasko]

I can finally run my firewall/antivirus in a hypervisor so viruses won't detect that it's there? This could be a whole new level of security.

Re:Does this mean...

[billcopc]

Er... if the virus is detecting your scanner, you've already lost the battle. Sure, the hypervisor would prevent the virus from having a sexy time with the scanner/firewall, but it will still infect everything else in the system.

Far better to just run a dedicated box with the firewall and virus scanner, to properly isolate your workstations from the idiotnet.

Re:Does this mean...

[drachenstern]

Either you're trying to be funny (in which case I thought it was cute) or you really don't get how VMs work, eh?

If it's the second, there's a whole lot of geek-reading you need to do about sandboxed machines versus sandboxed apps, ring0 versus the other rings, and more.

Re:Not FREE

[Vectronic]

"It is unfortunate that the word "free" in English has such multiple meanings."

Yeah, there should be like regulations and laws against that, who are we to look for alternate meanings, keep these language pirates from stealing our sources.

No, no, no, you can do a bunch with what's free

[joe_n_bloe]

If you don't mind rolling your own you can do a whole bunch of management via the VI API using, for example, Perl Toolkit. It's not necessarily simple but, hey, once you've written it, share it with other folks.

The enterprise-level management tools are necessary for complex setups but for smaller applications you are able to do a lot on your own. A whole lot! In addition to the obvious stuff like VM operations, you could probably do a clone, perhaps in a limited way, by copying and moving files in the datastores.

Someone who's industrious could get quite a bit out of embedded ESX.

Thoroughly suitable for DIY management

[joe_n_bloe]

Embedded ESX supports a large subset of the VI API (basically, everything that a standalone host can give you). You can write Perl or Java to your heart's content and get ESXi to jump through hoops. Virtual Center uses the VI API and it's quite possible you can write something you enjoy better. Go check out the Virtual Infrastructure SDK.

Commodity hardware

[joe_n_bloe]

ESXi and for that matter ESX will run on a variety of non qualified hardware. (Unsupported of course.) It will be interesting to see what kind of compatibility list people are able to come up with. It can't be worse than, say, the early days of Linux and 802.11 ....

Uh, X? Remote Desktop? Ssh?

[joe_n_bloe]

Aside from the occasional maintenance task (like if you have misconfigured your network) there's no reason you want *want* to use the VMware console. Just like any other server that's not right under your desk, you'll be using X or RDC. Or a command line via ssh.

Re:Uh, X? Remote Desktop? Ssh?

[nabsltd]

OK, so which of those remote access systems (X, MS Remote Desktop, or ssh) allow you to plug in a Firewire drive on the client machine and have it show up as a local drive on the the server (remote machine)?

RDP lets you see it as a network drive, and that still works fine even if the remote machine is a VM running under ESX. Neither of the others support any kind of "client drive visible on the remote machine" setup.

The problem is that ESX isn't like other virtualization systems where you have virtualization software running on your "desktop". On those, it makes sense to be able to plug a USB (or Firewire) drive into the "server" and see it on the VM as native. But, when the server machine doesn't have a local display that shows the VM screen, it just doesn't make any sense.

Re:Uh, X? Remote Desktop? Ssh?

[drachenstern]

Okay, so when I plug it in (remembering that USB and FireWire are nothing like a serial port, except that bit about sole ownership by one process when in use) how do I specify without using the console that this time VM12 gets to use the device, and next time VM01 gets the device? Provided there's no fancy scipts involved.

Sure, if you're only virt'ing one machine, then always plugging it in and having it show up on the guest is fine, but what about when you run more than one machine? I'm not going to console into ESXi and tell it to connect the FW-device to machine nnnnn and I don't think you want to either. Networked is the way to go in this situation. If you've only got one VM on the machine, then assuming it's not on the machine under your desk*, why is it not the native OS on the machine?

So's you know, I run 6 VMs on a dual quad with 16GB RAM and two HW RAID arrays, and I run VMWare Server, hosted on Debian Etch. When I want to install something on a host, I open the VMWare Server console, put in a CD, and install from here. Sure, it chews through the lan, but I can do it at night, without hurting anybody else's feelings (assuming I haven't put the iso on my iso tree in the root of the deb box). And it's nearly as fast as native-local.

*Mine isn't under my desk either, it sits off to the side. Whatever

Re:Uh, X? Remote Desktop? Ssh?

[joe_n_bloe]

You want a drive in your desktop machine to show up on your server? Um. As a local drive? Okay, that's not the way you would normally get things done, but let's go with it. Anyway you can export/share the drive from your desktop (be it Windows, Linux, or Mac) and then mount it from your VM as CIFS, or whatever, from Windows/Linux/Solaris. Assuming you don't have some horked up domain setup it should work fine.

Okay, let's see.

Yup works.

I don't know exactly what you have in mind here though. What are you mounting? And what for?

Works on fairly cheap servers [Commodity hardware]

[joe_n_bloe]

A Dell SC1430 will work fine. (Well, CIM's busted but whatever.)

I've spent the last two weeks researching VM tech

[J-F Mammet]

For my work we wanted to setup a HA cluster with 2 (or at worse 3) servers running both a Linux and Windows environment for some DRM stuff. So after years of just toying with VMWare server and simple VMs like that, I finally jumped into the wonderful world of hypervisors.
I of course first tried the open source solutions, and boy was that a nightmare. First Xen, on a DRBD+OCFS2+Heartbeat environment. Never managed to get it to be stable, got either kernel panic from OCFS after some time, or the servers would hang when doing live migrations. Also tried the iSCSI way, and still no way to stabilize the thing.
Then since I though the issue was with the only officially supported Xen kernel (2.6.18) I tried KVM since it's integrated into the mainline kernel. Well surprise, I got more or less the exact same result. Kernel panic when trying the migrate a VM...
So I gave ESX a try, not really believing it would be any better. Well, it actually works, but while it was easier to set up than KVM/Xen for HA and stuff like that, it sure wasn't trivial either. I spent a lot of time on google researching the various issues I was having (who would think that you HAVE to use the names of the machines and not their IPs when setting up the HA stuff?), but at least I got it to work. The accounting people sure aren't happy with it though...

what did you test?

[dgym]

There are so many options out there, and so few up-to-date benchmarks, can you let us know what else you tested?

I haven't seen a good (recent) Xen vs Linux KVM study (on hardware with NPT). Adding this free VMWare offering into the mix should be interesting.

small footprint

[dgym]

Does it really have a smaller footprint? Linux can be stripped down for embedded systems, as can the user space. You can even boot it from just a couple of floppies.

Considering you also have a huge library of drivers available for all sorts of hardware, I think Linux makes sense as a hypervisor.

I know many people think of Linux KVM as something you run from a full blown installation, but it doesn't have to be that way, and I think Redhat's new lineup might change that.

Re:small footprint

[Tony Hoyle]

The ESXi footprint is only 32mb. It can just be an extra chip on the motherboard.

Re:small footprint

[dgym]

As I said, a usable Linux system can fit on two floppies (1.44MB), so under 3MB. This would fit in some BIOSs.

Of course this is irrelevant, any system of these proportions can be embedded with the minimum of expenditure.

My point was that while ESXi makes sense as an embedded VM, it isn't the only option. Linux KVM can be smaller, and has more driver support, so I think there should be some healthy competition.

Re:small footprint

[Anonymous Coward]

The ESXi footprint is only 32mb. It can just be an extra chip on the motherboard.

And yet the ESXi .iso file you download from VMware is 249,462,784 bytes

Re:small footprint

[Allador]

Linux can be stripped down for embedded systems, as can the user space. ...
Considering you also have a huge library of drivers available for all sorts of hardware, I think Linux makes sense as a hypervisor.

Thats exactly what ESX/ESXi is. It's a home-grown branch of RedHat from years ago (as I understand it, at least), tuned for very small (= 32MB) footprint.

So arguing that Linux as a hypervisor is just silly, cause thats exactly what ESX is. It's just that with ESXi, you get someone else who is hugely experienced in this technology to do all the 'trimming & tuning' work for you, and handing you something that 'just works'.

Re:small footprint

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess vmware marketing must not be doing a good job because just about everybody seems convinced vmkernel is modified linux.

The reason vmware did not use Linux as everybody claims (they just use modified linux driver - Think NDIS wrapper which uses windows driver in linux.) is because the kind of OS required to manage few fat processes and multiple thin processes are completely different. Also vmware provides resource control like shares, container groups which the linux kernel does not support (ok support for containers were added recently). Also things are hugely different when each process has its own swap. Also they have their own distributed file system optimized for huge vm disk files. Put everything together and you have an OS.

Re:Not FREE

[drsmithy]

If it's not FREE (as in GPL v3), it's not FREE.

Please use the correct terminology.

It's not GNU/Free.

Babblefish translation please

[frovingslosh]

OK, I've RTFA. I've read the current comments here as far as they go when I start to write this. I'm still lacking understanding of what this is.

I've been using the free VMware player on-and-off for personal use. It works pretty well for what I've done with it (although sometimes the virtual machines get in a state where they refuse to start and I have to revert to a backup copy). I'm not able to find from the article or discussion here just what this brings to the table (or doesn't bring to the table) that the VMWare player doesn't (or does). Can anyone give a simple feature oriented breakdown of the various VMWare products (in particular the free ones)? A contrast to Microsoft and other offerings would also be interesting, although I expect I'll stick with some form of VMWare unless I learn something really amazing there.

If it matters I run VMware on dual core AMD2 processors that have the hardware visualization support.

Re:Babblefish translation please

[Anonymous Coward]

"VMware Player" and "VMware Server" are what are what is known as "hosted" products-- they run as applications within a Host Operating System-- windows or linux. With ESX, it runs as it's own host. Instead of installing an OS, then the VMware product on top of it, you just install it-- it will then handle bootup of the system, management of network and storage settings, and process scheduling.

The reason that this is appealing is that you have significantly less overhead than you would with a full-blown OS. This in turn, is likely to make it so that you are able to run more VM's on your physical machine (On the box that play with most with ESX, it's for 8 1vCPU VM's running on a single 4-core chip)

Hopefully this helps you get a start

Re:Babblefish translation please

[frovingslosh]

Thanks

Re:Babblefish translation please

[glitch23]

iESX is for server-class use of virtual machines. VMWare Player is for the private consumer to use virtual machines, specificallly ones created by VMWare Workstation or Server. iESX is a Hypervisor which runs right on top of the hardware just like an operating system. It gives the ability for operating systems in a virtual machine to run closer to the hardware without the need for a host OS. You pay a lot for this capability which is why it is for enterprise-class customers. I haven't paid attention to MS Virtual PC for a while but the last time I looked at it it was just on par with VMWare Workstation, in other words, it isn't for the enterprise per se. I believe MS was eventually planning for cluster support for it but don't know if that ever came to fruition. In general, VMWare is just more polished than the open source options but that is to be expected.

Re:Not FREE

[afidel]

It's easier to just use the Latin since the terms are distinct. In this case the software is gratis but not libre.

Hypervisor comparison sheet

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone found a decent guide for comparing free and pay-for hypervisors? I had a link to one here but now cant seem to find it?

AG.

Re:Not FREE

[nizo]

But riding my high horse is free! So I ride him everywhere because of high gas prices.

Good Alternative to VMWare Server?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using VMWare Server on my laptop for simple software testing. Would anyone happen to know if ESXi would be a good alternative. Obviously I don't have a server-class disk controller on my laptop.

Also, VMWare Server has a lot of trouble maintaining the clock. Would ESXi have the same problem?

Re:Good Alternative to VMWare Server?

[drachenstern]

Short answer: No, this is not an adequate replacement. Think ESXi == host-os. Can you directx from a guest? No.

At the very least, this is my so-far uninformed decision. Now, if you never have a need for directx or the like, sure, this would work. My advice, as I use either VMWareServer or VirtualBox (depending on the machine) is to stay with what you have.

Re:Not FREE

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize you're on Slashdot, right?

What video devices (if any) work under ESX?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my servers is used as a MythTV machine (running Linux) along with running various VM's. Could I install ESX instead of Linux and then run a Linux VM with the MythTV stuff? The VM would need access to the PVR-350 for capture and playback.

Re:What video devices (if any) work under ESX?

[Shadowruni]

No you couldn't as VMWare doesn't "see" your TV card.

simplicity

[dgym]

There are many setups that should work, but don't. I have used the following extensively, and in production, so maybe it can help.

On each node I setup LVM, from which I can allocate logical volumes for the guests (e.g. guest 1 gets /dev/guests/1 on both machines).

I then use DRBD to mirror the logical volumes, so yes, there can be quite a lot of DRBD devices - one per guest.

For OpenVZ the DRBDs get ext3 (so quota works) and it is mounted on the node running the guest. This doesn't support live migration, instead I suspend to disk, copy the dump, and restore it on the other machine. With the intermediate steps of unmounting, switching primaries, and mounting this takes about 5 seconds.

For KVM the guests just use the DRBDs directly. I enable dual primary which lets me do live migrations over TCP. This is extremely fast, fast enough that it would be appropriate for load balancing.

One notable benefit of this system, as opposed to cluster file systems, is that there is no locking across the network. Each logical volume is "owned" by one node at a time, so there is no need for synchronizing access for every read or write.

Seen too many options yet?

Re:What did you expect?

[drachenstern]

Yes ... oh yes, I see what you did there, that was kind of funny, no? You made an oblique reference to the Cathedral and the Bazaar and the comparison to open source versus free.

I'm still confused how one company giving away a (now) free product is anywhere close to the CatB model. ESXi is still very much Cathedral, unless I missed something.

Production Set Price Dropped to $8,854 from $9,349

[nutznboltz]

Let's face it, if you want to use ESX in a real production environment the cost has dropped only a little

R900 for virtualization is still $8,854 after instant savings.

Re:Not FREE

[grahamd0]

But you're playing right into the hands of big hay!

Mod Parent Troll?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod Parent Troll?

Re:What did you expect?

[zappepcs]

Marketing that I refer to is just this kind of thing: appear to be F/OSS so that the unwashed masses who are really beginning to understand F/OSS better will mistake your product for one of those "new-fangled cool programs" that is free.

Like puffing up a bag of chips with air to make it seem like more product, or making the bag opaque so you can't see how little is inside.

No, you didn't miss it, it's Cathedral but others *will* miss it. It's as good as the 'no payments for a year' scam. I truly believe we are going to see a LOT more of this. MS is starting a few of these scams but people are more leery of MS's bag of tricks. OpenSolaris is a nice trick, sounds good but any kind of support seems pretty much a pain in the ass if you are not using the pay-for enterprise version (or has been). I'm waiting to see what they do with their latest acquisitions.

It stands a chance of creating a bad name for F/OSS if not handled correctly with marketing ploys by F/OSS groups. Something they are not quite accustomed to doing.

That's the thought anyway... and the brilliant part of it all is that appearing to be F/OSS is now the 'in thing' to be seen to do. Mainstream software makers are actually validating F/OSS every time they use one of these scams. There doesn't even seem to be much of any kind of effort to actually assert that their product is better any more? game over, or so it seems. Switching to the support model that was quite well done by RedHat seems de facto business model now. The worm has turned and not many people noticed the change.

I don't quite understand the redundant mod? oh well.

Another way to read it

[symbolset]

By installing software from this company you acknowledge you understand that we're a 90% owned subsidiary of EMC, a BSA member company and our auditors can come in to bankrupt you at any time if you can't prove on the spot that the license is valid."

Is there anything else you need to know about this? Really?

Performance is not everything

[symbolset]

For example, this counts a lot to some people.

Re:Not FREE

[symbolset]

Generally speaking if it's from a company on this list, or a subsidiary (VMWare is a subsidiary of EMC), then it's not free without sufficient other assurances like the GPL to protect you from their audits.

Freedom's just another word...

[symbolset]

For "nothin' left to lose."

Apologies to Kris Kristofferson

Get off my lawn

[symbolset]

We used to call it "software."

That was a better day. It was long ago.

Really... get off my lawn.

Re:Get off my lawn

[Glonoinha]

Ahhh the days when software freely traveled the Fido network, available to anyone with a USR Dual Standard or Courier v.32bis connected to his machine. When the lowly v.22 guys were harassed for taking up too much time, plodding along at a mind-numbing 120cps (that's bytes per second, back then measured in characters per second) and the absolute bottom dwellers, the 30 cps (300 baud) v.21 and Bell 103 users had their lines unceremoniously pulled so 'real users' could get 'real work' done as 'reasonable speeds.'

Ahem. As Symbolset says - You kids get off my lawn.

Re:Production Set Price Dropped to $8,854 from $9,

[gallwapa]

Please - only because you use craptastic Dell machines.

We built a DL580 G5 (Dual proc quad core 2.2ghz intel procs) with 64gigs of RAM and an add-on 4 port gigabit NIC.

All for the low price of $14,000.

That price from Dell (instant savings and all) makes me want to puke.

Multiprocessing Environment?

[Doc Ruby]

So has VMWare (or any other virtualization layer) gotten to the point where I can install it on say, 3 PCs hooked up to a Gb-e switch, and run from a single console that just seems to run 3 times as fast? or that can handle 3 times as many processes, without my having to notice that it's really 3 PCs?

Re:Multiprocessing Environment?

[Kz]

the goal is the opposite of what you want. virtualization technology (VMWare, Xen, Kvm, HyperV, etc) let's you take a single high-power machine and make it behave like several (slightly) less powerfull machines.

Re:Multiprocessing Environment?

[amcdiarmid]

er: no-ish

You can run say 10 servers on a single box without much difficulty, but not using one Gb port. ESX has some nice features that will help you save resources: Say using the same memory chunk for some dll that is the same on multiple servers so that that chunk is only created once, instead of ten times. (Think Windows 2003 SPx; AV for ten servers that are kept concurrent: Most of those system resources are exactly the same so you use about 500MB for ten systems instead of 5GB.) That's one of the features that VMware ESX has over others. The other is is Dynamic Resource Scheduling: If you have multiple Host servers w./ licensing - you can have the guest machines automatically move themselves around so that the "Maximum" amount of resources are available.

However, you can't get away from storage. (I used NFS to a cheap server.) Nor can you get away from Bandwidth. That said, it's still cheaper to purchase a medium sized box and add many NICs to it, then to purchase multiple smaller boxes.

Simplified Disaster Recovery is just a bonus; it's still not simple.

Re:Multiprocessing Environment?

[drachenstern]

Really what you want is a virtualization client that can run on a cluster. I don't think I've seen that, but I'ld warrant that there are some R&D guys at EMC or MS working on that as you dream of it (as in, "There are no new [ideas/thoughts/dreams] under the sun").

I've thought of this myself, but the thing is, your guest o/s would have to run in ring1 at a minimum all the time, or more likely, the container would have to pseudo-execute everything, so there would be some degradation of performance.

My solution to your quest: Buy a bigger box. It'll cost about 4 times the cost of one box to double what you're specing for three boxes, but it'll consume less power, take up less space, and be more badarse in the end.

I'll put it another way. I just built a pedestal server not too long ago (first of May) for under $3000 that has RAID5, RAID1, a DVD DL burner, dual GigE, various amounts of still open slots (no multiple PCIe x16, but it's a server, not a gamer) and installed dual Quad Xeons and 16GB RAM. She's as responsive as the O/S let's her be (Debian). My point is this, the price for a midpowered desktop is around $700-$800, and anything less than that is not worth using for what you describe. So for around a little less than 4 times what you quoted, I have a machine with 8 cores that can totally rule (except for PCIe x16 graphics).

Re:Multiprocessing Environment?

[Doc Ruby]

Another scenario I'd like is using virtualization to connect say 3 machines by Gb-e (maybe 2 NICs each in a triangle, or even 4 NICs each in a double triangle), use one machine as the development server, the second as the test server, the third as the deployed server. Use virtualization to roll out/back between the different hosts. Keep each executing version archived on each server along with its source code / configs. So I can very quickly (a few seconds) roll out or back to any version on any server.

My OS is Debian (or Ubuntu). Can any virt layer do that yet?

Re:Multiprocessing Environment?

[drachenstern]

No, you just want some good scripts, this is not an application of virtualization...

Even so, I wouldn't want them to be so "close" in the cycle. I would prefer to see a manually initiated move process, even if it were scripted to be completely automatic. If you assume that everything will move on it's own, then you're inviting trouble, as it has to run at a schedule, no? Then it takes time to tar, etc.

Anyways, it sounds like you're asking for some sort of AI, or at least a few hours of good solid scripting work, and that's assuming that you had someone who was good at scripting in the first place.

Well, that's assuming that you're just using directories of scripts. If you're talking about moving live VMs around, then I think you have a flawed model still, but then at least you should be using the word snapshot for when you want a roll-back point.

Re:Multiprocessing Environment?

[Doc Ruby]

No, what I want is an environment that is actually 3 separate servers, but with all their configs on each synchronized, so the environment is identical. Having a single virtualized environment around which I send instances of an entire host, that I can archive and restore, ensures "sync" is really "identity" by having that single environment.

A single virtual environment (with all OS/apps/configs/etc), deployed to 3 different physical servers, for execution in each of their different roles on the identical SW.

I want to deploy a given instance of the entire environment, and archive it, all together. And I want to do that deployment simply and quickly.

Current virtualization doesn't do that, I suppose. I'll keep watching for when it does, if it does.

Re:Multiprocessing Environment?

[drachenstern]

Okay, I understand a little better about what it is that you want, but I still think you're looking in the wrong direction. This is not a "goal" of virtualization. Virtualization is about server consolidation, not server configuration management. For something like that, you want a good piece of management software (like the newish Canonical project) and possibly some good scripts.

I'll step back and see if anyone else were to comment on this, and I'll pick it over in my own head and see if I know anything that fits the bill...

btw: for offline discussions on this, if you care to, my nick above on gmail usually does the trick of getting to me.

Re:Multiprocessing Environment?

[Doc Ruby]

Thanks for the offer. I've already got my own management software / scripts. But if VMWare (or other virt SW) could do it, integrated with its other process management and installation features, that would be a reason to look again at VMWare. Especially since a common environment instead of my own idiosyncratic scripts for this completely universal task would be a good evolution of the biz. So I'll look at Canonical's projects. Thanks.

Re:What did you expect?

[drachenstern]

Very interesting set of points. Thanks for expounding.

I know my last post was smarmy, but I'm trying to be sincere on this one, as someone (most likely not parent_poster) will think I'm still being smarmy.

Really?

[Gazzonyx]

I'd be surprised to hear that it beats out Xen! Isn't Xen a lower level hypervisor as compared to the VMWare ESX kernel hypervisor? Although, I have heard that ESX has been sped up quite a bit recently - I just assume that whomever is riding closest to the hardware wins the speed race...

For me, the Big Win is native iSCSI support.

I was about to fire up a Xen solution on RHEL-5.2 tomorrow. I've got an eight logical core Xeon box that my boss and I were thinking about hosting a few VMs on, so this throws me for a loop now!

Re:Not FREE

[hesaigo999ca]

I believe he means free yeah sure, but all the tools you need to use to run it costs money, and sort of like installing the office engine on your computer, but without the word, powerpoint etc... you have the engine, but you cant do anything with it, unless you know c#, so you buy word for 100$ , then buy pwerpoint for another ...etc..

Working nicely

[zipherx]

Tested this on a Dell Power edge sc1425 (1U) with 1 Sata disk, and it installed with no hassle. It seems that the new Vi-client has some nice extra options compared to the older 2.0.x like plug ins, that can be added for support directly from you hardware vendor.
Say you want the HP insight manager plug in, to view health status on your server directly in your Vi-client, how neat is that!?

We have been running regular Esx since 2.5 and are going to upgrade to 3.5.2 (from 3.0.2) this Thursday, morning. Just wonder if it would be worth getting this on instead, then we could avoid renewing out support plan next year.
Since we aren't running on a San or any other centralized storage solution, we aren't using the enterprise tools, but just 4 DL385 boxes as stand alone.
There is a Cli (command line interface) for the i version, but if you need normal ssh into your box, use this guide: http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/ESXi_enable_SSH.php

This is really a brilliant move from vmware imho.

Re:Not FREE

[bondjamesbond]

Yes they are. Range Chickens are under GPL3, slower and therefore easier to hit. Clay pigeons have an ugly EULA and are closed source, like VMWare ESXi.

lack of a service console

[martums]

is the lack of a service console--no command line. I have a few Dell 2550(?) that for some reason have CDrom issues that I need console access for.

It is possible, though unsupported, to SSH in to ESXi. This doesn't have the same functionality as the service console, as you're probably aware. It's enabled on one or more of the ESXi servers we use, (for development, not production, lest the flames ensue), and is handy in a pinch. Paul Lalonde posted instructions in the community at http://communities.vmware.com/message/881978;jsessionid=529C6EC4C2DAD952438F591A8052BBBB quoting his instructions...

1. Boot your ESXi server, wait for it to finish loading, and then do the following:
2. ALT-F1 to change to the main console
3. Type 'unsupported' (you will not be able to see what you're typing)
4. When prompted, enter the root user's password
5. Type: vi /etc/inetd.conf
6. Find the line that begins with #ssh
7. Cursor over the first 's' and press the 'i' key (for insert mode)
8. backspace, esc
9. Type SHIFT+colon (:) and then 'wq!' to write and exit
10. Type 'ps | grep inetd' to find the inetd process
11. Send the hangup signal to the process ID output from step 10 with: kill -s HUP
12. You can now SSH into your ESXi server

HTH

Re:Not FREE

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"If it's not FREE (as in GPL v3), it's not FREE."

I was disappointed that it doesn't cure cancer or provide faster-than-light travel.

Firefox Warning

[Keick]

Just a heads up, the registration site won't send you an email if your running Firefox 3.x. I tried all morning waiting for my serial number. After getting anxious, I logged into my VmWare account using IE, and clicked resend key. This time, I actually got the email.

Lame :(

Just the "door" folx!

[Anonymous Coward]

They are clever, them VMWare perple! They are essentially giving you the "door" to a mansion!

Sure... it's gold-plated, awesome looking and it even comes with "mansion-compatible hinges" and all that...

But in the end, if you want to actually PLAY with ESXi, you need:

a) VirtualCenter 3
b) VI Client

Otherwise, they say that you can "use the door on a self-built tepee" AKA the OSS route they offer for their tools etc... but then you will just end up with a kick ass door on a tepee!

Sooo... what's the benefit of ESXi again? At least VMWare Server FREE is really FREE and actually is used by millions and is really supported! You don't need to buy a mansion to make it work! :) Sure, compared to ESXi+VC3 it's like a trailer, but... :)

--Russ
Office of Research
Virginia Tech

Re:Not FREE

[FishWithAHammer]

I'll stick with clay pigeons. I know they actually work. Range Chickens 4.0 is obviously a developer's release, after all.

My sarcasm detector is broken

[symbolset]

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not...

The experience back then was different for members of the network than it was for ordinary folk. For me it was much like my Internet experience is now.

Slashdot is not very unlike a Fido echo. I read and post neither more nor less than I did back then. It still takes an hour to download Linux. I don't chat any more. Subscribing to the Filebone was much like running BearShare or whatever they're using now, except that it was all legal back then. If I had to point to the biggest improvement since then it wouldn't be what you think -- not bandwidth, not graphics. I think the best think that's happened to the online experience is that you can Google stuff now.

We used to get together in real life, though. I miss that. Oh, and it costs about 5 times as much now.

But it's dell

[Anonymous Coward]

The DL series servers have always been awesome. Dell... not so much.

Right, you are

[mudgie]

I've been a VMware server user for about a year with a production server running a hosted Exchange server, a Windows 2003 Web edition server, a Win 2003 SBS machine and two XP workstations in a production environment (Win2003 x64 host). I just set ESXi up on a 2005 era SuperMicro 5014c-t 1u server with a pair of hard drives (both SATA). The boot drive is 80GB (total overkill) and the data drive is 500GB. I'm happily running two VMs (Untangle 5.3 and XP Pro 32bit) and both work great with 512MB each allocated. The server has a P4 3Ghz and currently 2GB of PC2-5300 ram (soon to be doubled to the motherboard max). I've never done iSCSI, and see no reason at his stage of the game to go there. I might try mounting NFS (couldn't get it working on my NAS drive, but I hear Windows servers do it nicely). For my clients (small 5-25 client businesses), I think consolidating 5-10 servers on a DL360 or an ML350 with 16GB of RAM would run perfectly. I could retire a lot of iron with this product and never lay eyes in iSCSI. I guess I could also set up an inexpensive Windows Storage server. I hear they can do both NAS and SAN with the proper software. Bottom line - any box with an Intel SCSI controller will likely work. Use an old 40GB drive for the OS and as big a drive as you can dig up for the data. The footprint is small, so it's likely you'll get three or four workstations, or possibly two servers up and running nicely. BTW, I tried attaching a USB drive. It saw it, but didn't offer it to me as a data store option.

Re:Not FREE

[Anonymous Coward]

GPL stands for GNU Public License?