Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
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.
Caveat Utilitor
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.
Website Hosting
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?
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Maybe that's why TFS said "free", rather than "FREE"?
Caveat Utilitor
(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 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."
This guy's the limit!
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.
Please help metamoderate.
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.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
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!"
I thought it was iSEX, maybe a new...Apple ummm...nevermind
use your turn signal! you people act like it's divulging information to the enemy
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?
Check out my sysadmin blog!
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..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
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).
I've heard that ESXi cannot talk to Virtual Center. Is that true?
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.
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"?
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".
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).
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.
Well I just bought this a few months ago... oh well
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.
use your turn signal! you people act like it's divulging information to the enemy
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.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
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.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Range Chickens? What, are these replacing clay pigeons?
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
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.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
"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.
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.
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.
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 ....
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.
A Dell SC1430 will work fine. (Well, CIM's busted but whatever.)
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...
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.
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.
If it's not FREE (as in GPL v3), it's not FREE.
Please use the correct terminology.
It's not GNU/Free.
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.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
It's easier to just use the Latin since the terms are distinct. In this case the software is gratis but not libre.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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...
I can be moderated as Inciteful...
But riding my high horse is free! So I ride him everywhere because of high gas prices.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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.
There are many setups that should work, but don't. I have used the following extensively, and in production, so maybe it can help.
/dev/guests/1 on both machines).
On each node I setup LVM, from which I can allocate logical volumes for the guests (e.g. guest 1 gets
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?
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.
2^3 * 31 * 647
No you couldn't as VMWare doesn't "see" your TV card.
"Chinese Amazons, power armor, laser swords.... things just meant to be." - Shampoo, A Very Scary Bet
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
2^3 * 31 * 647
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.
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.
2^3 * 31 * 647
But you're playing right into the hands of big hay!
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).
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).
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.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Is there anything else you need to know about this? Really?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
For example, this counts a lot to some people.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
For "nothin' left to lose."
Apologies to Kris Kristofferson
Help stamp out iliturcy.
We used to call it "software."
That was a better day. It was long ago.
Really... get off my lawn.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
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?
--
make install -not war
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.
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.
2^3 * 31 * 647
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!
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
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..
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.
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...
HTH
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety
"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.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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 :(
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?
2^3 * 31 * 647
I'll stick with clay pigeons. I know they actually work. Range Chickens 4.0 is obviously a developer's release, after all.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
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.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
2^3 * 31 * 647
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.