VMware Releases Open Source Virtualization Client

ruphus13 writes in with the news that VMware has finally decided to open-source its client for virtual desktops, releasing it under the LGPL. This was in response to intense pressure from the growing number of Linux distros that include virtualization by default. From the post: "The CEO replacement who entered VMware last year was Paul Maritz, a long-time Microsoft executive with intimate familiarity with how Windows swallowed up entire categories of utility software as it grew up by simply wrapping free utilities into the operating system. Paul knows about that, and he had to have seen last year the dual threats to VMware of open source virtualization offerings and virtualization on board in operating systems. The VMware View Open Client allows businesses to host virtualized desktops in the data center, and users can access their desktops from any device. Going with an open source solution like this was VMware's only choice, especially as Microsoft includes Hyper-V virtualization in Windows Server. I'm sure Maritz was very focused on the Microsoft threat, because he used to be behind similar threats. VMware can grab market share with this move, stave off Microsoft's dominance, and offer support and services around its open source offering.'"

Comments

Thanks...

[BlackPignouf]

Thanks, but I'm more than happy with VirtualBox, either open or closed source. Much faster & easier to install on my ubuntu boxes!

Re:Thanks...

[Anonymous Coward]

VirtualBox and its ilk are competitors to VMware Workstation. When it comes to the datacenter, nothing comes close to their enterprise offerings.

Re:Thanks...

[ionix5891]

unfortunately it is still rather buggy, tho since its open source it might get these issues fixed sooner or later

Re:Thanks...

[Anonymous Coward]

this is no VirtualBox competitor, it's a whole different product. it's the client for the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

Re:Thanks...

[morgan_greywolf]

Xen does.

Re:Thanks...

[Guspaz]

I agree that it needs a lot of work, but it's also improving at a pretty decent clip. I tried it when I ran Ubuntu 8.04, and had a nightmare with the networking. By Ubuntu 8.10, the included version made networking a snap, making it easy to use host networking to simulate a device on my network.

Another roadblock that was fixed in those 6-months; the older version couldn't boot Ubuntu Server (I believe it was a matter of VirtualBox not supporting PXE), while the newer version can.

Re:Thanks...

[morgan_greywolf]

Somewhat. I find that in 2.x on a Linux host with an XP guest, sometimes the VM gets stuck and hangs, making you have to kill it. If this happens, not all of the memory allocated to the VM will get reclaimed, which is highly annoying.

Only seems to happen, for me anyway, with XP guests. Linux guests and Win2K guests don't seem to have this problem.

Re:Thanks...

[whereareweheadedto]

Have you used Xen in enterprise environment? Well, I did a pilot project last year and Xen is nowhere near there. Maybe Citrix XenSource, but not Xen.

Re:Thanks...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Mod parent up. This product is pretty much VMware's equivalent of the Citrix ICA client, not one of their virtualization setups. Looks like a shot across Citrix's bow to me. By releasing the client as LGPL, they can, in theory, ensure that it will be trivial for anybody putting together a linux distro or thin client image to include support for connecting to their VMware view stuff(which is, shall we say, unlikely to be OSS soon).

Re:Thanks...

[morgan_greywolf]

Yes. While Xen is not as easy to deploy as ESX Sever, it performs quite a bit better in my testing. I think this is because Xen is paravirtualization, so it saves overhead by using the drivers from the host's Linux kernel, plus it has a very small footprint.

If you need cross-platform clustered filesystems, you might be better off with ESX as Xen doesn't include any, but you could always use a third-party solution. I haven't compared peformance on clustered filesystems, but I'll bet ESX's is a bit better in this regard. OTOH, if you're using a clustered storage appliance, then you might not really need clustered filesystems in your virtualization software.

Re:Thanks...

[whereareweheadedto]

Both are quite easy to deploy and Xen performs faster than ESX, but I never want to even think about running non-clustered virtualization solution. In this aspect does Vmware come in front. My bosses argued that the solution I select must have some level of official support and my free time is too valuable to spend saving 40 to 60 production virtual servers from crashing due to package update. I went to a Citrix presentation, where they showed us features of their Enterprise solutions. I must say that it worked flawlessly and I liked it, altough I am OSS fan. But final cost of Citrix solution is almost the same as Vmwares, if not higher. I was also considering using SLES10 Xen and Zenworks Datacenter management tools, which provide a high degree of availability, but in the end, when technical and financial aspects of every possible solution were compared, Vmware was clearly the solution we had to accept to achieve our goals. For next three years, we're commited to Vmware, but closely watching Xen. I hope I'll get to run it in a datacenter one day :) THe sooner the better.

Re:Thanks...

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Does Xen support Server 2008 yet?

Re:Thanks...

[morgan_greywolf]

Both are quite easy to deploy and Xen performs faster than ESX, but I never want to even think about running non-clustered virtualization solution. In this aspect does Vmware come in front.

I don't know. I had less trouble deploying ESX than Xen, but it might've been that I was using a somewhat pre-configured/tuned install image of ESX created by the company's operating systems group.

Anyway, Novell sells official support for Xen via SLES and their subscription policy is that one SLES subscription covers all the VMs on the same machine. Hence, the Novell solution was cheaper.

In the end they stayed with ESX, mostly because the CIO was getting kickbacks from VMware.

Re:Thanks...

[morgan_greywolf]

Oh, and we were using dedicated clustered storage hardware external to the VMs, so software-based clustered filesystems weren't necessary.

Re:Thanks...

[tweek]

Having done enterprise installations of both (pre-Citrix), vmware took the cake.

The problem with Xen was the problem with a lot of open source "products". They may be superior in terms of resources or technology but they aren't "enterprise-ready".

You can argue all you want about "hiring someone to hack on it" or "developing support tools internally" but those honestly don't fly except at a very specific company size. There are certain features and expectations that someone has when using something as core to infrastructure as virtualization and Xen isn't it (or at least wasn't at the time).

Re:Thanks...

[postbigbang]

Xen as Novell ships in SUSE 10.1/10.2 is dramatically better, if bereft of tools. xVM is also very good, but suffers the same problem. Adding value is the name of the game, and Maritz fights more than the lackluster implementations of Hyper-V. Ask Microsoft for their Windows 2008 sales numbers and watch them distract you from the question. It's selling like Vista, although it's not bad-- just difficult to value-justify upgrading to.

xVM on the desktop or server is nice... but lacks compatibility that ESX and Xen-alikes are pounding them with. Xen has improved dramatically, even from versions of six months ago. Citrix/XenServer is decent, but the SLES 10.2 version is ready to rock.

Re:Thanks...

[whereareweheadedto]

It was the same with us. We could go for Xen and Novell, but when I talked to my superior, who is a cool guy he asked me, how comfortable would I feel, when something went south and entire company was offline. In such context, Vmware offerings look much better. Altough I have good experience with Novell support, I know that Vmware offers a better one for their products.

Re:Thanks...

[morgan_greywolf]

I don't know. Server 2003 runs fine on Xen 3.02 or later with Intel VTX or AMD Pacifica supported by your processor.

Re:Thanks...

[Anonymous Coward]

Much faster? Uh... sure.

Sometimes I wish VMware would let people publish benchmarks because then I could show you the difference.

Try this: Install Windows XP/Vista/7 in VirtualBox and time how long it takes then try the same thing in VMware Workstation. Hell, you probably don't even need to time it because the difference will be quite apparent.

VMware also has much more capability for hardware (3D, USB, etc). Also, the snapshot/replay/etc stuff in VMware Workstation is lightyears more advanced than anything in VirtualBox.

Re:Thanks...

[ckaminski]

What did you use for clustered storage, if I may ask?

Re:Thanks...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

The same Xen that has somehow managed to get blacklisted by recent version of nearly all major distributions except Novell's? I still haven't been able to figure out why, but practically every distro has quietly dropped Xen support over the last year.

Re:Thanks...

[powerlord]

By releasing the client as LGPL, they can, in theory, ensure that it will be trivial for anybody putting together a linux distro or thin client image to include support for connecting to their VMware view stuff(which is, shall we say, unlikely to be OSS soon).

Since they've released the code as LGPL, could someone modify Xen to support the same communication protocol? (or is there a piece I'm missing?) THAT would certainly be OSS.

Re:Thanks...

[Znork]

but I never want to even think about running non-clustered virtualization solution.

On a Xen or KVM solution you simply use the distribution's clustering software. Moving VM's is much simpler than most HA clustered applications usually run by such software.

We'll be using the integrated Xen on RHEL5 for most linux virtualization needs, the price of ESX is one part, performance is another large part, and then add the lack of a linux VIC client, various driver issues yet another. And yes, that's in a datacenter setting.

Personally I consider the debate pretty much passe by now; it's like discussing wether to run a third-party TCP/IP stack in the 1990's. Virtualization will be a built in feature like anything else, no more 'third party' than 'fork'. The attempts by VMWare to play up their management tools are irrelevant, the very fact that the built-in techs can utilize the entire OS as underlying capabilities for management and leverage every new development immediately simply means a single company working on proprietary tech hasn't got a chance to keep up.

It's sad to see it happen, but IMO, VMWare have been sitting on their arse for five years cashing in. They could have been far ahead, and they could have dealt with most issues if they'd tried. Instead they're now stuck with a load of customers who use their products only for want of alternatives and who are now ditching ESX et al as each gets their requirements fulfilled elsewhere.

Re:Thanks...

[arkhan_jg]

It's a bit like Citrix ICA, but it's designed to hook onto a full virtualised desktop on the backend. You don't just get a thin-client desktop to play with, you get an entire hosted virtual PC all to yourself. Obviously the hardware load on your infrastructure + ESX servers is that much more than terminal server/citrix, and it's still a very new product. As you say, the enterprise backend is pretty expensive, while the client can now be stuck in anything and everything, including thin terminals.

VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) is their old name for this, they've now put it under the Vmware View name.

Re:Thanks...

[sholsinger]

If you want to use Xen, I suggest RHEL 5 or CentOS 5. They both have support of libvirt which provides an API to work with Xen and other virtualization technologies. Additionally, RH has provided the "tools" which many seek.

Also I saw a web application that seems to support plenty of virtualization technologies and is accessible via browser. I cannot recall its name at this time, however.

I have also tried Citrix's XenServer which appears to be a customized version of RHEL 5. Their tag-line of "10 minutes to Xen" isn't off base at all. You can really be setting up VMs within minutes. It does include 'yum' but I've found the default repositories to have nil in the way of updates. So 'borked' package updates aren't likely. I have found that it performs well on a single-server instance. But have been unable to test it in a multi-server pooled environment. Although it has the capability. That said, XenServer does seem to be focused on a more virtualized Windows environment.

Re:Thanks...

[nxtw]

Does Xen support Server 2008 yet?

Yes; any modern x86 OS should run on Xen in HVM mode, provided Xen emulates compatible hardware.

Windows I/O performance seems weak when compared to Linux guests, even when using the open-source paravirtualized drivers. With paravirtualized drivers, I get no more than ~30 MB/sec over the network to a Windows guest (CentOS 5.2 x86_64 host). Linux guest I/O is usually limited by hardware - ~70 MB/sec from a single SATA drive is no problem.

With Microsoft's Hyper-V (architecurally similar to Xen), Windows guests' I/O performance is also limited by hardware. Hyper-V supports Windows and SLES; they provide paravirtualized drivers for SLES 10 that happen to work in RHEL 5 as well. I ran a CentOS guest with the paravirtualized drivers and got decent I/O performance - at least 40 MB/sec. However, the host can't signal the CentOS guest to shut down and the guest locks up after resuming if I have the host suspend the VM then reboot.

Re:Thanks...

[TooMuchToDo]

Clearly, Xen is solid enough to be used in enterprise environments:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Elastic_Compute_Cloud

EC2 uses Xen virtualization.

Re:Thanks...

[rathaven]

So run Xen clustered - http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/18831.html

Once you have the initial config mastered its easy to deploy to other servers with Autoyast.

I'd also say it was enterprise ready - certainly a *lot* of our infrastructure is now hosted on it and is very stable unless we overload the nodes.

Re:Thanks...

[rathaven]

You can use OCFS2 for clustered filesystem storage with Xen - if its good enough for some seriously scaled Oracle Database Clusters then a few host OS's (file backed) work well on it for most uses. We host Windows and Linux boxes on this with no issues.

Re:Thanks...

[Samah]

I went to a Citrix presentation, where they showed us features of their Enterprise solutions. I must say that it worked flawlessly and I liked it, altough I am OSS fan. But final cost of Citrix solution is almost the same as Vmwares, if not higher.

F/OSS does not always mean "better", contrary to the beliefs of many slashdotters. As always, you need to weigh up the pros and cons before making your choice. What you've implied is a very sensible stance to take, and you should take cost and/or open source into consideration when making your decision, but just because you can modify a program's source code doesn't instantly make it a better product.

Re:Thanks...

[setagllib]

Because Xen has dropped them. The last kernel officially patched by Xen developers is 2.6.18, from about two years ago. The Xen developers must have sold out, but it's their loss, since now KVM performs just as well and is much easier to administer.

Re:Thanks...

[mysidia]

But since the client is being Open sourced, that should also mean the protocol can now be analyzed easily.

I would expect someone could independently develop a LGPL'ed backend implementation, or "adapter" for the now-open protocol, to allow VMware VDI clients to connect to different solutions.

Re:Thanks...

[scientus]

KVM is even better, it has all the really cool stuff that virtualbox and vmware hold behind locked doors, live live migrations, multiple clients, and its going to get alot better.

for a GUI see virt-manager

Re:Thanks...

[scientus]

KVM is gonna win over Xen, especially with the emergence of IOMMU devices in the mainstream

Re:Thanks...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you referring to Enomalism?

Re:Thanks...

[whereareweheadedto]

It certainly is stable and enterprise ready. But, what is enterprise? Some, like Amazon made good use of it. Some didn't and are now worse off. And in our case, we can't yet, because we can't allow downtime on certain services. With Virtual Infrastructure 4 there will be new Fault tolerance feature included, which will allow the virtual machine to run on more hosts, and when one fails, the other takes over seamlessly. Without downtime.

Re:Thanks...

[rathaven]

I've always found downtime in these scenarios relative - both in terms of actual time and integrity of service. What is too long - is 30 seconds too long? what about a minute? What happens to the data or connections in the different scenarios?

In a clustered Xen configuration if you have the monitoring set correctly the machines will failover. The question is, in a Xen or ESX scenario, what that means...?

From my perspective there are 2 options - to a boot of the same machine on another node (if you don't then how can you be sure the machine won't come online in the same state - broken) or to perform a live start from a last known state, mirroring ram, cache, database transactions from the last state with a level of transactional integrity?
Out of the two options we could see in both environments option 2 was out of reach without being cluster aware at the service level (largely database process) as well as guest OS clustering and so we made the decision to put up with a reboot (though we can still do live migration for maintenance). I suspect it won't be long before the live migration capability in Xen will also transform to live restart though I will still be concerned for our databases and services on top of it until I am convinced of their integrity before and after the migration..

Re:Thanks...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Yep, been using KVM myself recently. I never looked closely at Xen after I saw the hoops I'd have to jump through, but KVM and the third party tools that support it (also OSS) make it simple to provision and administer new VMs.

Re:Thanks...

[whereareweheadedto]

Absolutelly right. We just have to wait and see. Unfortunatelly in the meantime, we'll have VMware. They are pricey and milking their customers, but they also deliver their goods.

Re:Thanks...

[Guspaz]

Huh? I never said anything about Xen, I was discussing the progress of VirtualBox under Ubuntu...

Re:Thanks...

[sholsinger]

Yeh, I know but parent above you was. I have a bad habit of posting comments to the wrong parent. Sorry :\

VMWare was always a doomed business.

[tjstork]

It's not just Microsoft that has a free virtual server. Sun Microsystems OpenBox is free and its good. Then there's a bunch of other open source ones. So, I wouldn't go chalking up a threat to VMWare based on Microsoft. All those people writing free virtual server systems for Linux are cutting into the cake as well.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no idea what you are talking about. VMware is far from doomed given the current "virtualize the moon" craze. Also, the fact that you called Sun's VirtualBox by the name OpenBox clues me into this fact. Also, the fact that you don't see HyperV as a threat to other virtualization systems, tells me you haven't played with it. It's fairly fast in a lot of performance tests, it's pretty damn stable compared to VMware, VirtualBox, and LVM. It also works for most Windows environment operations, something that you'll find other virtualization suites don't do. Not to mention the cost, free with a Windows Server 2008 license.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[imcclell]

The problem to that is a matter of perception and money. It's not that there aren't other viable options, it's how people perceive those options. When you talk to a manager in a mid to large size business, every last one of them is aware of VMware, and every last one of them is aware of Hyper-V because MS was so vocal about it. You may see some Fortune 500 guys who are big Sun shops that may talk about OpenBox, but that's not the norm.

So when the higher ups go out for lunch, are they talking about the open source virtual server? Probably not. They're probably talking about VMware or Hyper-V because that's what their friends companies are running.

Also, when was the last time an open source vendor took a higher up to an expensive lunch or on a business trip?

The worst part about corporate IT purchases is that they rarely have anything to do with quality or return on investment. They're usually made on a recomendation of a friend of a higher up, or back room deals. How many times have you seen a CIO go on an expensive all paid "business trip" from a company and all of a sudden you have an exclusive deal with them?

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[Kjella]

On the Linux end "VirtualBOX OSE" is great for the desktop... then there's a bunch of freeware ones. Even KDE

Dude, I know KDE4 was doing a lot of wierd stuff... but did they build a whole virtualization system too?! Or just one more app that runs on Linux like VirtualBox, or well not "just another" because it's a lifesaver when you really want an app, there's no Linux counterpart and it just won't play nice in WINE.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[tjstork]

Well I shouldn't say KDE, but I thought the "K" team had a virtual solution of their own, yeah. I think I would have tried it on my Opteron but I was using an older model that did not support hardware virtualization so it wouldn't install.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[Anonymous Coward]

Logical Volume Management?

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[Enry]

Might have meant KVM

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[nschubach]

Not to mention the cost, free with a Windows Server 2008 license.

That's not very free...

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[idiotnot]

Not to mention the cost, free with a Windows Server 2008 license.

No, there's a standalone version w/out 2k8 server. Supposedly you can manage it with anything that has a recent MMC (XP/2k3/Vista/2k8). I tried it out, and gave up after about 2 nights of trying to get the management console to work.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[tlacuache]

Perhaps you're thinking of qemu and its accelerator module kqemu? I don't think this actually has anything to do with KDE or the "K team," as you called it, it just happens to have a k in front of its name.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[DiegoBravo]

With that logic Windows is also a doomed business because of Linux and a lot of Unix clones. Many of good quality, all struggling, open source, etc. But it takes more that price.

In the loooong term, if nothing else changes, maybe you're right.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[jonaskoelker]

Also, the fact that you called Sun's VirtualBox by the name OpenBox clues me into this fact.

That might just have been a brain fart on tjstork's part. But feel free to come to a different conclusion if you think it isn't.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[larry bagina]

I like and use virtual box, but it has some serious problems. First hand, it doesn't support openstep or NetBSD 5 as a guest. (I've heard it doesn't support haiku either). FreeBSD 7.1 occasionally gets disk geometry errors. Their main concern seems to be supporting windows (and I suppose Solaris), which I've never had a problem with. Outside that, good luck.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[hedwards]

Try setting up either of those on FreeBSD, I don't believe that they are available and I don't think anybody's managed to hack something that makes them.

The other options might could be better, but if they're not available on your chosen platform that makes them worthless.

It's not necessarily about VMWare being better, it's about having another option, right now pretty much the only options I've seen have been Qemu and it's derivatives. And even having 2 options is immeasurably better than just one, even if both are ultimately free.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[Monoman]

That may or may not be true. They offered a good VM product for the Enterprise before anyone else. Now that others are getting into the game (mostly MS for Windows servers) VM needs to keep being innovative and offer what the others do not.

MS is still playing catch up but at some point their product will be good enough to grab the market share. Once virtualization is the norm VMWare will be left with filling the niche markets.

Look at it this way. Citrix beat MS to market with their Terminal Services solution. MS now has TS built in to their server product(licensed from Citrix I think). It is good enough for many of their customers but Citrix is still around and offers solutions for the needs not met by MS in that area.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[Karrots]

kvm possibly? But I don't think they are associated with KDE.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds like they're making a nice wrapper on KVM on Linux. Not a bad thing, really. KVM, while it's not as nice or as fast as VirtualBox OSE, does do a few things that VirtualBox doesn't do or do as well as KVM does it on Linux.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad it doesn't support anything but SLES..... Maybe one day they can compete on ability, but until I can run RedHat/CentOS then there is no place in my DC for the MS product. I get free virt licenses with my RedHat purchases too so they aren't doing much there.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[interiot]

Bigwigs can talk all they want. Once a product is free, the grunts don't have to involve the bigwigs in the decision-making process. And grunts choose products based on merit.

I suppose there are support contracts, but 1) that only applies to the largest businesses, and once medium and small businesses move to another product en masse, then bigwigs will start hearing about that other product ("what's this Firefox I've been hearing about so much lately?). And 2) when the answer to "do we need a big support contract for product X" is "not so much... all our people already know product Y inside and out, it's free, it's what they use in their own projects at home, so it's easier to get internal support for that", then the bigwigs will start paying attention to product Y too.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Not to mention the cost, free with a Windows Server 2008 license.

That's not very free...

Microsoft offers Virtual Server for free as a standalone download. My understanding is that it's a minimal Windows Server OS as the hypervisor.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[tvjunky]

It's also free without a Windows Server 2008 license. Link

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, the fact that you don't see HyperV as a threat to other virtualization systems, tells me you haven't played with it. It's fairly fast in a lot of performance tests, it's pretty damn stable compared to VMware, VirtualBox, and LVM.

Sorry but you have to compare HyperV to VMware ESX. And saying that HyperV is more stable than ESX is just funny!

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[PitaBred]

It doesn't just happen to have a k in front of its name. The k is just for "kernel" instead of "KDE"

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[Locutus]

As far as Citrix is concerned, Microsoft failed at negotiating a pruchase of Citrix back in the NT days IIRC and about 6 months before shipping a new version they announced they'd include terminal services in Windows. This caused Citrix's stock to plummet to about 25% of its previous value. A couple of months later, Citrix and Microsoft signed a deal where Microsoft licensed Citrix for 5 years and after that, owned the source to that version. Much like what they did to Sybase with SQL Server.

If you realize that Microsoft is a marketing company using their monopoly in the OS market, then it's clear that when they can leverage that monopoly, they can eventually dominate in a market segment but their products are far from good and often just good enough for those who don't look for solutions. The "we're a Microsoft shop" crowd.

I think VMware knows they must remain valuable in the server virtualization market or they are done. As you mentioned, Citrix is a good example for them that surviving a monopoly leveraged attack can be done.

LoB

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[lwsimon]

You meant VirtualBox OSE, right? OpenBox is a WM.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[imcclell]

I can honestly say that of the places I've contracted at, small to medium businesses are the more likely to want support contracts. See the big companies assume their covered. The little guys like the assurance of one less thing to worry about. You may think you've convinced them that they don't need that support contract, you haven't. If you start trying to convince the owner of a company that they don't need support, they start looking for a second opinion because the idea that you don't need support goes against common sence.

At to the point about firefox, firefox and open office are 2 rare apps amongst thousand of open source apps. 2 amongst thousands doesn't make a pattern that supports your arguement. I hope more open source apps reach the critical mass of those 2. I really do, but let's not take 2 fringe cases and make an arguement out of them.

P.S. It's always better to buy support contracts because support is cheap. Not buying support means that 1) you have an internal resource spending their time on something 2) the cost to the business of being down. I'm sorry, but when I buy from a vendor It's their job to know their software and someone who deals with it 100% of the time is likely going to be able to fix the problem faster than someone who spends 20% or less of their time with it.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[setnaffa]

You're wrong. MS VS is an application that runs on an OS...

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[Anonymous Coward]

In any case, tjstork demonstrates (yet again) that he's an idiot.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[shutdown -p now]

Microsoft offers Virtual Server for free as a standalone download. My understanding is that it's a minimal Windows Server OS as the hypervisor.

Your understanding is wrong. Microsoft Virtual Server is an old MS product from the Virtual PC line. It does not have anything to do with Hyper-V.

What you probably meant is Microsoft Hyper-V Server. And yes, that one is actually free too.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, gave up on VMware a while ago, used VMware Server for a long time.

But VirtualBox is now better and faster, especially at restoring saved images (5 secs in VirtualBox vs. 5 mins in VMware Server).
Use VirtualBox everyday for 32-bit & 64-bit guests and it runs extremely well.
But in the long run xen and more likely KVM and the way to go.
I'll be trying out kvm next, especially paravirtualised Linux guests. Full virt required for legacy OS like Windows.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[Anonymous Coward]

And from that very page you link, the system requirements detailing required host OS. So you have to install windows, then you can install this

Supported Host Operating Systems

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, or Datacenter Edition or later

Windows Server 2003 Standard x64 Edition, Enterprise x64 Edition, Datacenter x64 Edition or later versions

Windows Small Business Server 2003 Standard Edition or Premium Edition

Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 or later (for non-production use only).

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[setagllib]

KVM lacks the video acceleration that VirtualBox has, but for server virtualisation KVM is stupidly fast even without paravirt drivers (which are provided via virtio and drop dead easy to setup on a Linux guest).

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the cost, free with a Windows Server 2008 license.

That's not very free...

Microsoft offers Virtual Server for free as a standalone download. My understanding is that it's a minimal Windows Server OS as the hypervisor.

The hypervisor one is HyperV. See here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/trial-software.aspx

The one referenced above required a host OS:
"Supported Host Operating Systems :
        * Windows Server 2003 Standard SP2
        * Windows Server 2003 Enterprise SP2
        * Windows Server 2003 Datacenter SP2
        * Windows Server 2003 Standard R2
        * Windows Server 2003 Enterprise R2
        * Windows Server 2003 Datacenter R2
        * Windows Server 2003 Standard SP1
        * Windows Server 2003 Enterprise SP1
        * Windows Server 2003 Datacenter SP1
        * Windows Server 2003 Standard x64 SP2
        * Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 SP2
        * Windows Server 2003 Datacenter x64 SP2
        * Windows Server 2003 Standard x64
        * Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64
        * Windows Server 2003 Datacenter x64
        * Windows Server 2003 Standard x64 R2
        * Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 R2
        * Windows Server 2003 Datacenter x64 R2
        * Windows Small Business Server 2003 Standard R2
        * Windows Small Business Server 2003 Premium R2
        * Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 (non-Production only)
        * Windows XP Professional SP2 (non-Production only)
        * Windows XP Professional x64 Edition (non-Production only)
        * Windows Vista Ultimate (non-Production only)
        * Windows Vista Business (non-Production only)
        * Windows Vista Enterprise (non-Production only)

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the cost, free with a Windows Server 2008 license.

That's not very free...

Microsoft offers Virtual Server for free as a standalone download. My understanding is that it's a minimal Windows Server OS as the hypervisor.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794852.aspx

Latest update (Feb 4, 2009) on how to do just that. but it's not free, just free to try.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[mysidia]

Hyper-V Server 2008 is a free download.

The virtualization is free, the workstation OS to manage it, and the OSes to install on top of it are not.

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[scientus]

KVM will own everything else, its free, thin, and has excellent driver support, and is the only hypervisor to support real time scheduling

Re:VMWare was always a doomed business.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

D'oh. Yes, that is indeed what I was thinking of. Thanks.

What about VMWare Player?

[Ed Avis]

A popular way of distributing software - especially for people to try it out - is as a complete Linux distribution disk image that you can run with the VMWare Player. Is that program also going to become free? (If not, I guess it should be replaced with VirtualBox, but VirtualBox doesn't seem quite as polished.)

As far as I can tell this is just a client application connecting to the VMWare View server, which is some kind of Citrix-like remote desktop server and remains proprietary. So no big deal, it appears.

Re:What about VMWare Player?

[joemod]

VMWare Player is already free but not opensource.

Re:What about VMWare Player?

[Anonymous Coward]

The player application has been free for a long time, and vmware even link you to disk images for you to play with. What you can't do for free is create disk images. I gave up with vmware due to the problems it has every time the linux kernel updates. Until vmware get the relevant code into the kernel and gives us a stable product, they can sod off. Free as in OSS isn't going to happen, most people use it to install windows, which you need a real license for.

Re:What about VMWare Player?

[rthomanek]

[...] VMWare Player. Is that program also going to become free? (If not, I guess it should be replaced with VirtualBox, but VirtualBox doesn't seem quite as polished.)

Care to elaborate on that (VirtualBox being less polished in this scenario)?

I seem to have exactly the opposite impression; I used to work a lot with VMWare but I was forced to check other options when VMWare failed to run on one of my PCs and since that time I am using exclusively VirtualBox.

Re:What about VMWare Player?

[ReeceTarbert]

A popular way of distributing software - especially for people to try it out - is as a complete Linux distribution disk image that you can run with the VMWare Player.

Speaking of which, and yes this is a shameless plug, just recently I've prepared a desktop ready FreeBSD 7.1 RELEASE based on the Xfce 4 Desktop Environment. Okay, it's not Linux, but comes with Firefox 3, Thunderbird 2, OpenOffice.org 3, VLC, Pidgin, Xchat, Gimp, etc. installed an ready for use. It's available via torrent -- in case anyone cares! ;-)

Re:What about VMWare Player?

[geminidomino]

It's available via torrent -- in case anyone cares! ;-)

Apparently no one does. Seeds = 0. :(

Re:What about VMWare Player?

[MBGMorden]

Not only that, but VMWare Server (which uses the same "format" of vm) is also free. Their recent move to web-only admin tools has gotten annoying, but overall it's still very nice and lets you manage things much more in depth than VMWare Player does.

Re:What about VMWare Player?

[ReeceTarbert]

FWIW, I see 4 at the moment and I've seen up to 10 (small fry, I know). Give it some time! ;-)

Re:What about VMWare Player?

[Directrix1]

What does your last statement mean? What does Free as in OSS have to do with installing Windows? VirtualBox is free as in OSS and can install Windows.

Re:What about VMWare Player?

[wastedlife]

VMWare Server is great if you don't mind the bloat of the new version. I gave up on using it on my laptop to work with images on the go because it was such a resource hog. I could install one of the older versions, but all my VMs are configured for "v7" on VMware server and will no longer load properly in VMware server 1.x. Now I work on images using Sun VirtualBox and create and run images on a server running VMware Server.

Re:What about VMWare Player?

[pedrop357]

As of the latest version, VMWare Server still (quietly) comes with the Virtual Infrastructure Client.
For windows installs, it's here:
C:\program files\VMware\VMware Server\hostd\docroot\client\VMware-viclient.exe

In the field "IP Address/Name", use https://name/ or IP%:8333
You need the VMware authorization and VMware Host Agent service running, but can disable the VMware Server Web Access service if you don't use the web interface.

I do wish they would update the viclient to use later hardware versions. As is it is right now, if you want to use the viclient, you're limited to VMs with HW version 4 and you can't do change hardware or connect/disconnect higher level virtual machines without going to the web interface.

Re:What about VMWare Player?

[pedrop357]

I should have used preview
https//NAMEORIP:8333
insert the : after https

Re:What about VMWare Player?

[raddan]

I downloaded and installed VMWare Server on Ubuntu 8.10. No problems there. I appear to be able to start it and use the web interface. My problem is-- how the heck do you use the thing? I can create a VM and start it, but then I see nothing. Doesn't seem to matter if I tell it to boot from a real CD or an ISO. I get nothing.

It's entirely possible that I'm missing something obvious... Any idea what could be going wrong?

Re:What about VMWare Player?

[MBGMorden]

You need to co to the "Console" option and bring up the screen in a seperate window so you can actually see what's going on. It's an awefully slow way to use a system though, so for Linux VM's you want to get to a point where you can use either SSH or X11 to connect remotely ASAP, or on a Windows VM you'll want to switch to RDP. Once they make it to that point you just use them just like any other remote system that you would have hidden in a server room somewhere :) (and actually, most of my VM's are like that anyways - they run on 1 of several VM backends that I have in the server room and I just treat them like a bunch of remote machines).

Re:What about VMWare Player?

[Ex-Linux-Fanboy]

Did you install the VMware tools?

I've been digging around to find a good CentOS 5.2 VMware image. There are four (OK, five since Linhost.info has both a desktop and server VMware image of CentOS 5.2) available on the web:

• Thought Police. Lousy image; the VMware tools aren't installed so there are issues like the clock being incorrect and not being able to seamlessly go from your desktop to the image and back again, nor the ability to dynamically resize the desktop.
• Bagside has a really nice CentOS 5.2 VMware image. In addition to haveing all of the VMware tools installed, it also has its own unique Bagside default theme which looks nice. If the theme annoys you, it can be changed. Also, the image is a bit large (nearly a gig)
• VM planet has some nice VMware images, which I haven't had a chance to try out yet.
• Linhost.info also has some VM ware images

Note that hosting VMware images is expensive, so if you use an image and really like it, it's polite to make a small donation to offset their large hosting and bandwidth costs.

Re:What about VMWare Player?

[squidinkcalligraphy]

As far as I can tell this is just a client application connecting to the VMWare View server, which is some kind of Citrix-like remote desktop server and remains proprietary. So no big deal, it appears.

Correct; I would suspect this is a way to get their client included in the main repositories of popular Linux distros. But if effect, it seems like little more than an RDP-type client, which already exist. (Sun's Virtualbox non-OSS edition provides connections to the virtual machine via the RDP protocol, so you don't even need a 'client' since most OSes already come with one)

Re:What about VMWare Player?

[scientus]

you actually can, just create them in qemu/kvm, or even create them are raw images through imaging etc, and then use qemu-img to convert them.

qemu-img can also create just basic vmdk image that you can then use, or you can use vmware-server while is really the only decent vmware tool and can do everything vmware player can do.

Re:What about VMWare Player?

[mysidia]

What "problems"?

I update my VMware CentOS/RHEL and Ubuntu guest kernels all the time and don't have regular issues.

The only time i've ever had issues with updating a kernel VMware was when I was when I was using a VMXnet network driver, so VMware Tools was required software (and has to be reconfigured for new kernels).

The solution there is simple: for Linux guests, never use VMXnet, always use the Flexible NIC type in ESXi, or vlance in VMware server.

It's not an issue with VMware, it's an issue with your distribution, and Linux in general (in the fact that it doesn't let you load old drivers in a brand new kernel). If your distro included the open source open-vm-tools, or tools package from VMware, things would be better.

A third party not-invented here solution has about as much chance of being included in the stock kernel as Xen PV support, which is essentially 0, the kernel developers will never allow it, not for solid technical reasons like it would harm the kernel, but for political reasons like "our preferred solution is going to be KVM"

It would be like asking Microsoft to include Chrome in Windows, in addition to Internet Explorer.

The perceived value of high prices

[erroneus]

VMWare's Workstation and advanced server products are expensive and companies have been buying them for quite some time as part of their infrastructure. Asking these customers to believe that "free" stuff is greater-than-or-equal-to what they have been spending thousands upon thousands of dollars on is like asking Christians to consider the notion that there is no god. They simply can't go there mentally.

There is value perceived in spending lots of money on something. Take diamonds for example. They are NOT by any means "rare." Their beauty is debatable. But people perceive their artificially high prices as value even when faced with the fact that diamond "resale value" is nearly nothing by comparison. Some people think spending more money on things make them more worth while, more valuable, more elite. Starbucks built a nationwide chain on the idea. Clothing stores have been exploiting this perception for more than 100 years in the U.S.

And then there are the commercial software vendors...

Re:The perceived value of high prices

[Anonymous Coward]

There is value perceived in spending lots of money on something.

The housing market and the .com industry imploded under the weight of perceived value as soon as those invested in them, respectively, wanted the money they were alleged to have had.

Re:The perceived value of high prices

[OnlineAlias]

You discount the fact that really big implementations nearly require VMware to work by simple virtue of the maturity of the product. By really big, I mean 1000 to 3000 guest servers and 10's of thousands of desktops. You think enterprise managers are going to go with Xen or Virtual box in these scenarios? Not a freaking chance. The marginal cost of the software is a pittance compared to the losses incurred when the project fails or even worse, when it sputters for a long time and then dies.

Here are some numbers.

VMware enterprise licensing and support= 2 mil.
Server hardware, infrastructure and storage= 4 mil
Professional services = 2 mil.
Overall savings to organization in in heating cooling, data center, backups, personnel and equipment refresh over 5 years= 10 mil.

Savings doing it with some other software= 500 grand (no one cares).
Failed project = -16 mil.

Comparing VMware to Starbucks as a luxury boutique product is nonsense. It is the only one that can and has actually delivered an enterprise capability.

Re:The perceived value of high prices

[jcookeman]

This.

Re:The perceived value of high prices

[spikenerd]

True, but perceived value is not real value. Companies that sell perceived value will only make money in the short run. It looks like VMWare is willing to throw away something with short-term value to rub out some competition. That's something that can give long-term benefit to a company. This world has too many companies trying to sell perceived value already. I wouldn't diss VMWare for making a move away from there.

Re:The perceived value of high prices

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent +1, Actually Knows What He's Talking About.

Re:The perceived value of high prices

[Anonymous Coward]

erroneus (253617) (how's that for well-named?!?) may want to take another look at the TCO of using "free" (read informally supported) software in business applications.

When one considers an average company with an enlightened view of their IT infrastructure, it's never just "how much does this cost to acquire". It's "how much will this cost me to acquire, implement, operate, support, and shutdown".

Gartner's TCO Model, for example includes direct (hardware, software, network, personnel, training, etc.) and indirect costs (informal support, downtime, etc.).

The rest of your shallow attack on US-based Capitalism is equally myopic.

You're welcome... ;-)

Re:The perceived value of high prices

[setnaffa]

Erroneus needs to read up on TCO. Businesses live by evaluating ALL costs. Direct acquisition costs are only a small part of that. Support costs for open source ARE more expensive than for major vendors who supply training and other support. Just because something costs more to buy does not mean it costs less to operate. Windows-based sysadmins are easier to find than those who claim to know Linux... Supply and demand... Trust me or not. Your choice. The attacks on US-based Capitalism are totally non-sequitor and equally shallow.

Re:The perceived value of high prices

[TooMuchToDo]

Amazon trusts Xen to drive it's entire EC2 cloud computing infrastructure. Which, may I add, also drive's Amazon's entire online retailing business. I'm sure it's ready for enterprise scenarios.

Re:The perceived value of high prices

[erroneus]

Support is never a guarantee. It is a bonus at best when you can get it. Ever read an EULA? Simply, they say "we don't guarantee anything."

Re:The perceived value of high prices

[erroneus]

Once again, just as in asking a Christian to consider that there might be no god, people cannot look outside of their comfy EULA "guarantee of nothing" world to see that F/OSS is becoming a very big dog lately and doing some very big things.

I tend to think the real underlying problem is that people are afraid to actually do things for themselves or in truth, discover that they can't do something for themselves. F/OSS represents a rather serious hurdle -- learning something new.

Re:The perceived value of high prices

[ion.simon.c]

Support costs for open source ARE more expensive than for major vendors who supply training and other support.

Got any apples-to-apples comparisons to back this up?

Windows-based sysadmins are easier to find than those who claim to know Linux...

Doubtful. You *do* know how many Ubuntu users there are, right? I'd be willing to be that the bulk of them would claim to know Linux. :D

Re:The perceived value of high prices

[Hucko]

You have a great name. I am a Christian and have contemplated there may not be a god. He disagrees though.

Re:The perceived value of high prices

[Allador]

Asking these customers to believe that "free" stuff is greater-than-or-equal-to what they have been spending thousands upon thousands of dollars on is like asking Christians to consider the notion that there is no god. They simply can't go there mentally.

What an incredibly ignorant set of assertions.

Many, many IT directors do actively and regularly examine the open-source alternatives to their vendor-supplied systems. Sometimes they change their systems as a result.

Someone below explains how many of those analysis go. Sometimes the more mature solution is worth a few extra dollars, especially if the few extra dollars are small compared to the total cost of the implementation, and tiny compared to the cost of failure. Sometimes its not, but thats a decision made every day.

Many, many Christians consider the notion that there is no God. Some of them fall away as a result, some of them dont. Some of them are even intelligent and can hold multiple concepts in their heads at the same time.

Your post is a ridiculous, nonsensical assertion that has no basis in reality and can trivially be disproved by simple observation.

Re:The perceived value of high prices

[Allador]

Lets think about this.

Amazon is using Xen to build a product/service. They're not only using it internally in an enterprise capacity.

And Amazon's use of Xen in EC2 doesnt fall under the typical definition of 'enterprise'. They're a service provider.

The economics around open-source for a service provider are completely different than the economics for a typical enterprise just using it internally.

For the latter, virtualization isnt core to the business, its just a tool they use to get the real stuff done. In many cases, therefore, its not worth it to skill up internally and work through the warts of a system like Xen.

For the former (like Amazon), who wants to sell a product at volume, the marginal cost of non-free virtualization dwarfs other costs at volume. Therefore, in their situation, it is economically worth it to staff up in-house, learn the warts, and maybe even modify Xen to fit their needs.

But the two situations are not even remotely equal, and you cannot compare them. It is not logical to say that because Amazon uses Xen in a for-pay product/service that they sell, that its a good choice for random Corporation X who just wants to use it internally to manage their system instances.

Re:The perceived value of high prices

[erroneus]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1116579&cid=26734647 -- I couldn't have said it better myself.

And the fact is, people STILL subscribe to the notion that "you don't get fired for buying Microsoft." There are claims to consider F/OSS and then there are people who use it rather successfully. "Cost of failure" is just another way of saying "Fear of failure."

Re:The perceived value of high prices

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, i *never* had a xen VM crashing, very rarely with virtualbox, but with vmware i had loads of problems starting from stability/random crashes and ending in that the clock is running too fast/slow inside the VM.

What exactly is it that VMware can do better? What do you mean by "Enterprise Capability"? That it comes on a CD in a hard box with the word "Enterprise" on it?

And for what I know, VMware is (mostly) an *emulator* which means damned slow in comparison with real virtualization like xen and qemu.

And I don't really get the sense of most support contracts and the like, IF something goes wrong, won't care for you much less than do anything to balance your loss...

I think I will stick with an integrated Solution..

[Anonymous Coward]

Like Citrix XenServer. That way I can have a supported virtualization layer (XenServer), Application Management (XenApp, Presentation Server), and client (good old ICA). This just leaves me the decision on whether to take the plunge with true thin clients or stick with my laptops and desktops for now. Since there are now several thin client manufacturers around, I have plenty of choice.

I am no Microsoft fan... but since one-product companies like VMWare haven't tended to have good prospects after Microsoft enters their market. Netscape Navigator anyone? How about that hard disk compression company? Unfortunately I think VMWare's future is pre-determined.

AG

Now how about an ESX Client?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, now let's have a GUI for Virtualcenter/ESX that doesn't require Windows.

Re:Now how about an ESX Client?

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Agreed. Even a web client. How hard is that, VMware?

    What company builds their product on top of Linux and then builds a GUI client that only runs on Winders?

Re:Now how about an ESX Client?

[tweek]

Here here. It's sad that I have to have a VM of windows running to communicate with a Virtualcenter server hosting Linux VMs.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Re:Now how about an ESX Client?

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody has got to mod this up...

I mean common, a Windows PC to run the Virtual Center?

Do you know how annoying this is to a shop that does not do Windows... ever?

Re:Now how about an ESX Client?

[Alex Belits]

What company builds their product on top of Linux and then builds a GUI client that only runs on Winders?

Citrix.

Re:Now how about an ESX Client?

[LNX Systems Engineer]

Yes, PLEAAASE. For that matter though, we need a VirtualCenter server that runs on Linux, too. Then I can wipe the one and only Windows (2003) box in my datacenter.

Re:Now how about an ESX Client?

[LNX Systems Engineer]

I hit submit before finding the article, but VMWare was talking about clients for Linux, iPhone (uh, why?), and OS X back in September of 2008. 5 months later and nothing to show for it. http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/151194/vmwares_virtualcenter_coming_to_linux_iphone.html

Re:Now how about an ESX Client?

[drinkypoo]

Here here.

Where? Where?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Papa Echo Bravo Charlie Alpha Kilo.

Re:Now how about an ESX Client?

[techwrench]

I believe there is a Linux GUI (not a Web GUI) version of ESX available.

http://www.vmware.com/download/download.do?downloadGroup=ESX_255
http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/

Re:Now how about an ESX Client?

[MichaelJE2]

What company builds their product on top of Linux and then builds a GUI client that only runs on Winders?

You don't remember the Sharp Zaurus do you? It is built entirely on linux but won't sync with it.

Re:Now how about an ESX Client?

[powerlord]

Here here. It's sad that I have to have a VM of windows running to communicate with a Virtualcenter server hosting Linux VMs.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Quebec Foxtrot Tango.

(doing the same thing myself)

Re:Now how about an ESX Client?

[Locutus]

and wasn't it strange that the development environment was Linux also? Who in their right mind releases a product which they promote as leveraging the open source development community and then basically tells those developers they can't use the device with their desktop.

They also didn't open source the PIM applications so there ended up being something like four other PIM suites and none of them were really that good.

The original Linux based Zaurus was pretty cool but Sharp screwed up running the show on the software side.

LoB

Re:Now how about an ESX Client?

[beaviz]

Agreed. Even a web client. How hard is that, VMware?

What company builds their product on top of Linux and then builds a GUI client that only runs on Winders?

VMware.

Re:Now how about an ESX Client?

[Anonymous Coward]

ESX isn't built on top of Linux. The Service console for the ESX Server is a linuxy VM but the hypervisor, the part doing all the cool stuff, isn't linux at all. That thing you're ssh'ing into to execute neat stuff from the command line could have been a windows box for all the hypervisor cares, but I'm sure that would have been expensive and noone would have taken it's ability to be secure seriously.

Re:Now how about an ESX Client?

[swb]

How about providing a GUI at the console for management and interacting with VM consoles without a seperate computer?

Let's add in SATA and USB support while we're at it and then I can run ESXi on my laptop. I just might wet my pants if that happens.

Re:Now how about an ESX Client?

[Anonymous Coward]

Modded funny?
Interesting, if anything.

When Citrix bought XenSource, the first thing they did was release a new version with a control panel that only ran on Windows.

The previous client was Java and ran beautifully on the usual suspects.

Re:Now how about an ESX Client?

[mysidia]

It's closed source, so how can you really know?

I think the "Hypervisor" may be intermingled with the service console in more ways than they care to mention.

Too late

[MistrBlank]

I jumped ship to VirtualBox at the end of last year after being a long time VMWare Server user.

Server's switch to a terrible UI on version 2.0 and the fact that they continue to charge for VMWare fusion made me look for alternatives.

VMWare still has the best enterprise virtualization management products though in the meantime so I'm not terribly worried about them making a vanishing act.

Re:Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

VMware basically ruined whatever marketing value the zero cost VMware Server gambit provided. For those who aren't familiar with the drama:

VMware Server 1.x contains a straightforward native client that works efficiently as a console for virtual machines. It's the same basic client VMware has used for the last decade or so across the produce line. It isn't perfect, but it is very usable, stable, etc.

With the 2.x release they eliminated this client and replaced it with an enormous Tomcat+Java+Browser plugin mess that is slow, unstable, buggy, a memory hog and generally horrid.

Oh, and the download size went from ~120MB to >500MB, installs to 1.5GB, erects a complete Tomcat stack and mangles your browser(s) with nifty new plugins.

At one point VMware considered enhancing the new client to pop up goatse.cx images at random moments throughout the day to drive the last post-1.x holdouts to VirtualBox, but it turned out to be unnecessary. There aren't any holdouts.

Tragic really.

Re:Too late

[flyingfsck]

Yup, some things are better *without* a web browser interface.

Re:Too late

[ericrost]

You can still download and install 1.x. I do. I use it because I can do a headless desktop install accessed only through the client and run an autologin gnome session to run azureus plus plugins. Still haven't found a server side solution that meets my needs without a lot of scripting which I don't have time to do.

Re:Too late

[Have Brain Will Rent]

Yeah I tried to do a little project a year or so ago using VMWARE and it just wouldn't seem to do what I wanted. I looked for help on the net and along the way someone suggested VirtualBox. I wasn't getting any answers that helped with VMWARE so I tried VBox and it did the trick. Not as polished a product at the time but it did the job for me.

Re:Too late

[fnj]

1.0 won't install on any recent kernel.

Re:Too late

[ericrost]

I don't know what problems you've had, but I run it on Hardy just fine. You have to use an open-source alternative to some of the VMWare tools in the guest, but if you use the vmware-any-any-update patch it runs just fine. I have 2 machines running 4 vms in my attic on Ubuntu Hardy Server with VMWare Server 1.0.8.

Re:Too late

[ericrost]

Or, if you don't believe me:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=788169

Re:Too late

[mysidia]

Don't use a bleeding edge kernel. You actually need patches to make it work.

Use CentOS 5.2, install the kernel-devel package, and VMware Server 1.0.x works fine.

Re:Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Ohhh! a "COMPLETE Tomcat stack"???

My "tomcat stack" is 15 Mb install and takes 80 Mb RAM started with the sample apps, how big is yours?

I assume you probably mean a lot of other stuff like faces, J2EE and there you can debate the "hog factor", but please don't mix up apples and oranges!

The clients free, but the server co$t$

[operator_error]

VMware View Open Client lets you connect from a Linux desktop to remote Windows desktops managed by VMware View.

http://store.vmware.com/servlet/ControllerServlet?Action=DisplayPage&Env=BASE&Locale=en_US&SiteID=vmware&id=ProductDetailsPage&productID=94648100

VMware View Enterprise Starter Bundle + Platinum (24x7) 3 Year Support

Including View Mgr 3, VC Foundation and VI VDI licensed for 10 desktop VMs (Includes 1 ESX license for 2 CPUs)
        $2,456.25

VMware View Enterprise Starter Bundle + Platinum (24x7) 2 Year Support

Including View Mgr 3, VC Foundation and VI VDI licensed for 10 desktop VMs (Includes 1 ESX license for 2 CPUs)
        $2,197.50

VMware View Enterprise Starter Bundle + Platinum (24x7) 1 Year Support

Including View Mgr 3, VC Foundation and VI VDI licensed for 10 desktop VMs (Includes 1 ESX license for 2 CPUs)
        $1,875.00

VMware View Enterprise Starter Bundle + Gold (12x5) 3 Year Support

Including View Mgr 3, VC Foundation and VI VDI licensed for 10 desktop VMs (Includes 1 ESX license for 2 CPUs)
        $2,303.25

VMware View Enterprise Starter Bundle + Gold (12x5) 2 Year Support

Including View Mgr 3, VC Foundation and VI VDI licensed for 10 desktop VMs (Includes 1 ESX license for 2 CPUs)
        $2,085.90

VMware View Enterprise Starter Bundle + Gold (12x5) 1 Year Support

Including View Mgr 3, VC Foundation and VI VDI licensed for 10 desktop VMs (Includes 1 ESX license for 2 CPUs)
        $1,815.00

Re:The clients free, but the server co$t$

[scientus]

it doesnt even work with vmware-server? what BS

Games?

[chill]

The only reason I have a Windows image at home is for a couple of games. So far, only VMWare Workstation can handle Windows gaming with any decent speed since it supports DirectX. Do any of the other virtualizers work well with gaming? I'm talking about games like COD4, America's Army, and others based on the UT2/UT3 engine.

Re:Games?

[Anonymous Coward]

no.

Re:Games?

[syousef]

The only reason I have a Windows image at home is for a couple of games. So far, only VMWare Workstation can handle Windows gaming with any decent speed since it supports DirectX. Do any of the other virtualizers work well with gaming? I'm talking about games like COD4, America's Army, and others based on the UT2/UT3 engine.

It most certainly doesn't handle games with decent speed. Lets look at the game compability list, updated this month:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-1287

Now lets look at your games:

COD4 - "Starts up fine, but too slow to play. Frame rate is about 2 FPS at 640x480 with all settings reduced to minimum. VM settings - 1.5GB ram, 2 VCPU's, optimize for VM."

America's Army - Not on the list

UT2/UT3 - Not on the list. Not sure which games on the list might be derivatives

Other complaints even for games reported to work are "choppy sound, minor texture glitches", "Sluggish, but playable.", "Flawless; low FPS", "Flickery top bar and "Sticky" graphics"

This does not sound to me like something a frequent gamer would put up with, when dual booting would give much better results.

VMWare is to be applauded for their DirectX effort, but they're not quite there yet.

Re:Games?

[Anonymous Coward]

VirtualBox does OpenGL now. Anyone used it?

Re:Games?

[Bert64]

I believe that americas army and ut2 are available natively for linux and mac anyway, and therefore don't need to be used under vmware...

Re:Games?

[chill]

America's Army for Linux/Mac is 2.5 (4 or 5 version behind), and has ceased to be supported. There are very, very few servers to play on. There are rumors the new 3.0 client will be back for Linux, but I'll believe it when I see it.

By UT2 I meant UT2-engine based games. Sorry for not being clear.

Re:Games?

[fnj]

no.

Would you care to elaborate?

Re:Games?

[BikeHelmet]

COD4 - "Starts up fine, but too slow to play. Frame rate is about 2 FPS at 640x480 with all settings reduced to minimum. VM settings - 1.5GB ram, 2 VCPU's, optimize for VM."

This does not sound to me like something a frequent gamer would put up with, when dual booting would give much better results.

VMWare is to be applauded for their DirectX effort, but they're not quite there yet.

Sounds like hyperbole to me - but even if it wasn't, what would you expect with that videocard?

A new videocard + fully up to date DirectX/drivers is the best way to get okay framerates if you really want to do this rather than dual-booting.

Re:Games?

[Anonymous Coward]

no.

Would you care to elaborate?

no

Re:Games?

[syousef]

A new videocard + fully up to date DirectX/drivers is the best way to get okay framerates if you really want to do this rather than dual-booting.

There are PLENTY of people on that link with better cards and plenty more complaints.

Why on Earth wouldn't you want to dual boot for a game? It's not like you'll be writing a word document and checking your email while playing a FPS or simulator.

Re:Games?

[scientus]

wine has vastly better directX support

Hyper V - Free with Windows Server 2008

[LibertineR]

Uh,..good luck with that....

Re:Hyper V - Free with Windows Server 2008

[diskis]

Those prices seem to include support. What does the support for hyper-v cost? I'm under the impression that MS techsupport isn't exactly free :)

Too bad..

[DSmith1974]

..Sun's Virtual Box does it easier, quicker and got there first.

Re:Too bad..

[Yosho]

..Sun's Virtual Box does it easier, quicker and got there first.

Does Virtual Box support SMP yet? I don't know if it counts as "quicker" if it can only use one of my cores.

Re:Too bad..

[cool_arrow]

As of 2.0.2 release there was no support for SMP. Possible in the future though: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=1176

Re:Too bad..

[Slashcrap]

..Sun's Virtual Box does it easier, quicker and got there first.

Too bad you don't even know what the product under discussion is, you dumb fuck.

I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

VMware has too many products. I don't understand the difference between:

• VMware Fusion
• VMware server
• VMware workstation
• VMware view
• VMware ESX
• VMware Player
• VMware ACE

Is VMware viewer this product http://store.vmware.com/servlet/ControllerServlet?Action=DisplayPage&Env=BASE&Locale=en_US&SiteID=vmware&id=ProductDetailsPage&productID=94648100 ? If so, what does it exactly do for me? Can I create virtual machines? Can I open .vm machines? Can I connect to some remote server hosting and running the machines, like a VNC?

Thanks,
~T~

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

You were not put upon this world to "get it"!

Re:I don't get it

[flyingfsck]

It is a replacement for rdesktop and RDP on Windows. Why? I cannot fathom why. It makes no sense really.

Re:I don't get it

[BlackPignouf]

Easy :
        * VMware Fusion is for Windows Vista Starter
        * VMware server is for Windows Vista Home Basic
        * VMware workstation is for Windows Vista Premium
        * VMware view is for Windows Vista Business
        * VMware ESX is for Windows Vista Enterprise
        * VMware Player is for Windows Vista Ultimate
        * VMware ACE is for Windows 7

I think...

Re:I don't get it

[Directrix1]

Mr. Burton

Re:I don't get it

[PrescriptionWarning]

funny :)

but seriously, VMware Fusion is for OSX only and offers desktop integration. The rest are for linux and windows. Server & Player are free, as is ACE i think, but the rest are generally for cost.

Re:I don't get it

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Actually, this is a pretty good post. Unfortunately by posting anonymously, you've managed to get some useless responses to what appears to good, serious question.

Wikipedia has some good explanations of various VMware products and some differences between them. Some of them have more functionality than others. The free ones always do less than the pay versions, although what the free ones can do may be enough for some people.

Our VMware expert told me that at his previous job one of the VMware products was only available as a commercial product (no free version at that time - don't remember if that's still true) and although nowhere in their website did they say this, if you tried to buy it, VMware would refuse to sell it to you unless you bought support for it and the support contract cost more than the software did. He said that VMware was infamous for upselling required support and whatever you thought you were going to pay to buy stuff from VMware, in his experience it always cost more in reality. To be fair, this isn't true for everything they have though. We bought a lot of copies of Fusion at work and didn't have to pay for any support of them, just Fusion itself.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Vmware Fusion - Desktop Virtualization for Mac Hosts
Vmware Server - Free Server Virtualization for Linux/Windows hosts
Vmware Workstation - Desktop Virtualization for Linux/Windows hosts
Vmware Player - Free Desktop Virtualization for Linux/Windows Hosts, missing many features that are in workstation
Vmware ACE - Product to add security and restrictions to workstation/player images for distribution

Vmware ESX - Server Virtualization, running it's own OS (hypervisor), so bare metal installs
Vmware View - A Connection Broker, to create and hand out virutalized desktops to end users

So what this product is, is a client that connects up to the Vmware Broker. This product will connect up to the VDM (the connection broker), and VDM will validate the authentication, determine what types of desktops you are allowed to use, and then connect to Virtual Center (vCenter) to power on/customize/clone a new desktop. That desktop will be a virtual machine running in an ESX farm. This will allow this client to pull up an RDP session to that virtulized desktop.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I connect to some remote server hosting and running the machines, like a VNC?

Thanks,
~T~

basicly VNC, in extremely broad stroke. VNC connected to a server running software that costs a couple thousand dollars. It won't do those other things you mentioned.

Re:I don't get it

[redxxx]

Rdesktop is actually a dependency for VMware View Open Client. install instructions

They aren't reinventing the wheel or anything. They are just strapping some stuff onto to make it easier to use and a little more functional and using a different protocol.

Re:I don't get it

[Locutus]

* VMware Fusion
Seems to be a client which includes Unity which is a way to integrate individual apps in the virtual machine with you desktop apps. IIRC it's for Mac,Linux, and Windows

* VMware server
Free server verstion and multi VMs at one time. For Linux and Windows( maybe Mac )

* VMware workstation
Non-free desktop product. For Linux and Windows( maybe Mac )

* VMware view
Client application which connects to a virtual machine on a server and displays that virtual machines display. VMware has been changing their remote display interfaces. There's much going on in the virtualization of the desktops for Windows( think something like XDMCP but each user gets his/her desktop and OS unique to them.

* VMware ESX
Non-free server with much management tools. IIRC, this is virtualization with a massively stripped down Linux kernel so it is VMware server without much of a host OS.

* VMware Player
Free desktop player, only for running existing virtual machines one at a time.

* VMware ACE
Not sure

LoB

Re:I don't get it

[arkhan_jg]

* VMware Fusion - desktop virtualization on macs, also allows you to run individual windows apps but they appear as a window on your OSX desktop. Not free.

* VMware server - free virtual server hosting setup. Fairly basic, but allows you to run multiple OSes on a single physical server and linux or windows host OS, and have them provide services on the network - or RDP/VNC into them and use them for testing, etc.

* VMware workstation - similar to vmware fusion, but for linux/windows, and without the 'open an app as a native window' feature. Not free. Designed to create and snapshot multiple vms on your own desktop.

* VMware view - virtual desktops. You give your users their own personal desktop image, but it's stored on your ESX servers, not their local hard-drive. A bit like thin clients, but you virtualise the entire pc, not just the desktop. they break it with a virus? Spin them a new one off the spare pool, or bring their old one back from backup snapshot. Or just have a standard pool, and hand them out automatically as needed. Vmware view is the clientside app that lets them connect to their virtual desktop, but since all the virtualisation work is done serverside, the client can be low-power.

* VMware ESX - enterprise grade virtualisation server. Combined with vmware infrastructure, you run a bare minimum hypervisor (no overhead from a standard linux or windows OS host), store your virtual machines on a SAN or NFS, have a pool of physical servers and automatically load-balance your VMs between them or even bring them back up automatically if a physical server goes bang. Nearly completely abstract your servers from the hardware, run 20 servers per actual piece of tin. Very much not free.

* VMware Player - free basic app that lets you run VMs on your desktop, but not create them. Largely superceded by vmware server (now free) except for specific uses.

* VMware ACE - packaged VMs. You create a VM with workstation, send it out, then they run the ACE package on their local PC, with a VM OS + app setup inside it. Allows you to have a standardised VM available on your desktop machines, without all the overhead of ESX, SAN, network etc, but your desktops need to be grunty.

Re:I don't get it

[arkhan_jg]

Oh, I did forget one.

Vmware ESXi - free, cut down version of ESX, very new. bare-metal hypervisor (so you need to dedicate an entire physical server to it), and you manage it much like ESX, though you need to pay to combine multiple ESXi servers together under one management screen. Rather similar in principle to vmware server; depends whether you want the host OS to also do other things, or just give the entire box over to ESXi (which is quicker and more robust)

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off, scumbag

Re:I don't get it

[nurb432]

Each is rather clearly spelled out on their product pages.

If you don't know the differences, perhaps you are not quite ready for virtualization.

Oh, and don't forget ESX has its companion ESXi to confuse you even more :).

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Fusion: OSX to run other x86 apps
Server: Lin/Win New one to make/run virtual environments, no snapshots, free (as in cost)
Workstation: Lin/Win to make/run virtual environments, with snapshots, cost for subscription, trial available.
View, dunno
ESX: runs like Xen underneath an OS, unlike the others as a program in the OS, cost.
Player: Lin/Win to only run VMs, free (as in cost)
ACE: dunno

Re:I don't get it

[scientus]

yeah this is kinda useless, people can just use XDMCP or VNC on the host and skip installing any of vmware's code on the client.

Re:I don't get it

[mysidia]

VMware has too many products. I don't understand the difference between: ...

OK:

• VMware Fusion - This was a desktop virtualization product originally designed to run on MacOS hosts; its major purpose is to satisfy the needs of desktop users who need to run some windows applications on their Macs. It is a competitor to Parallels Desktop, and it provides a "Unity" feature to compete with parallels "Coherence"; this essentially means the applications you are running inside the guest _look_ like they are running directly on the host OS.
• VMware server - This is a free product for virtualizing _server_ loads. It runs on top of a host OS, and it is a successor to what used to be called VMware GSX server. It runs as a service in the background, you can close the console application and it's still running, you can connect to the console remotely. All connections to the virtual machine display are VNC connections (even local ones), the client side is always connecting to the server, and the client displays the console, so there is no possibility of hardware 3D or DirectX support, graphics performance is very bad, and you can't really play console games in a VMware server VM.
• VMware workstation - This is very similar to VMware server, except its intended for use on a desktop machine, for example, for running test environments, or developing software. But it runs as a desktop application, not a service, the program you start IS the console (you don't start a client that connects to 127.0.0.1 and displays a remote framebuffer). It provides some desktop hardware support that VMware server does not have, for example, things like virtualizing DirectX, or the ability to run games would exist in workstation but not VMware server. In VMware workstation, you also have "snapshot manager" and image libraries, you can take multiple snapshots of a running virtual machine, revert to a chosen snapshot, or close a snapshot at will. In VMware server, only one snapshot can be active at a top, and you have to shutdown your virtual machine to remove the snapshot.
• VMware view - This is a desktop virtualization solution; you run a server on one physical machine that hosts desktops, the client viewer software runs on a workstation and connects to the server, to create an effective illusion that the remote virtual machine _IS_ the local desktop
• VMware ESX - This is part of VMware's VMware Infrastructure (flagship product for Enterprises), it is intended for virtualizing production server loads, where you want to run as many servers as possible on given hardware. Unlike VMware server, it installs on bare metal, you don't install an OS on an ESX server, ESX server _IS_ the OS. Since VMware is running on bare metal, performance is much better.
• VMware Player - It was released before VMware server. You can think of it as a crippled version of VMware workstation that allows you to run pre-defined images, but not to build your own virtual machines the way you like, and many of VMware workstation's useful capabilities are unavailable.
• VMware ACE - This is a solution for distributing virtual desktops TO the client PC and managing from a central location.

Is VMware viewer this product http://stor.../

VMware viewer is part of that product (the client side), they haven't made the backend side free.

Re:I don't get it

[mysidia]

Server: Lin/Win New one to make/run virtual environments, no snapshots, free (as in cost)

You can take one snapshot with VMware server, with a caveat that you should never do it on an important VM, because you have to shutdown the VM in order to remove the snapshot.

If you leave the snapshot open, VM disk I/O can be noticeably impaired (esp. if you use pre-allocated disks for performance reasons), the physical server will probably run out of disk space, eventually, because snapshot files keep growing as long as changes are written by the guest to its disk (frequently happens on say an active windows guest).

ESX: runs like Xen underneath an OS, unlike the others as a program in the OS, cost.

ESX was there first, so i'd rather say Xen runs somewhat like ESX.

With the caveat that ESX is truly independent of any guests. Xen on the other hand piggybacks on the Linux kernel, requires that privileged dom0 guest.

The SC in ESX is not so intimate with the hypervisor, as can be evidenced by the release of ESXi, which is essentially ESX with no Linux.

Re:I don't get it

[Longstaff]

* VMware ESX - enterprise grade virtualisation server. Combined with vmware infrastructure, you run a bare minimum hypervisor (no overhead from a standard linux or windows OS host), store your virtual machines on a SAN or NFS, have a pool of physical servers and automatically load-balance your VMs between them or even bring them back up automatically if a physical server goes bang. Nearly completely abstract your servers from the hardware, run 20 servers per actual piece of tin. Very much not free.

Almost. What you're describing is full "VMware Infrastructure". ESX is the bare-metal hypervisor - and has actually been "replaced" with ESXi. This is a stripped down version that has a smaller install footprint and therefore a lower exposure to exploits. Most of the old ESX patches were for things like Samba and CUPS on the service console. ESXi now comes from vendors like Dell in an embedded form even: 32MB on an SD card, pre-installed, no hard drive required.

You can use local storage with ESX and ESXi; just format it with VMFS. When you're dealing with live-migration (vmotion), automated resource balancing (DRS) and bringing VMs back up after a bang (HA), that's all part of VMware Infrastructure and Virtual Center.

Very much not free - BUT the ESXi installable hypervisor? Free. Go download it now if you want it. Due to the stripped down nature, it supports a more limited set of hardware than VMware Server (which relies on a regular host OS to work out the hardware details), but it performs much better. Depending on the host hardware and VM workload, you can get a 20:1 VM:host ratio with your eyes closed.

Re:I don't get it

[underlord_999]

[in a dungeon...]

Wang: VMWare has plans for us, if he didn't we'd be dead door-nails.

Jack: Which VMWare, little ol' free VMWare viewer on-wheels or the 10,000 dollar ESX road-block?

Wang: One and the same software, Jack!

Jack: You know something you're not telling me, Wang!

Wang: Myths and legends... I don't want to insult you.

Jack: No go ahead, insult me!

Wang: It's about all sorts of scary things, about an ancient army of almost-dead servers who lived in Spirit City... and monkey sacrifices.

And the first sovereign emperor of OSS, that mad monarch, confederated our 7 warring distributions and defeated VMWare, then imposed upon him that horrible curse of no hardware, in 272 BC.

A lot of systems engineers hear these things as kids, then we grow up... and pretend not to believe them.

Jack: No horse-shit, Wang?

Wang: No horse-shit, Jack. Hell, I don't blame you. I'm a systems engineer myself and I don't even want to believe it. But it's for real... virtualization, and systems black magic!

Re:I think I will stick with an integrated Solutio

[aesiamun]

Nice little plug for a company...

http://citrix.com/English/ps2/products/product.asp?contentID=683148

Here's the real page.

Catering to SMEs

[troll8901]

I think VMware can gain a certain market share by catering to SMEs' needs as well.

1. VMotion between different hardware (e.g. between Intel and AMD CPUs, on very different motherboards).

2. Virtual environment (no need to run multiple guest OSes).

3. Storing VM on networked NAS (not sure if it's already supported).

4. With the above in place, shifting VMs at night onto a few physical servers (with different hardware) so as to save AC bill.

I know (1) and (2) are quite difficult to implement, and even if implemented, guest OS will either run slowly (fully virtualized CPU) or may not react well to the slightly different instruction sets in CPUs.

And of course, like all my requests to Santa, I can keep on dreaming in wonderland...

Re:Catering to SMEs

[Anonymous Coward]

VMware is working on #1, and you might see it in ESX 4.

Both #3 and #4 are already implemented in the current Virtual Infrastructure 3 line. In fact, #4 can be automated, so that VMs are consolodated onto fewer ESX servers and servers with no VMs are shut down, and then start back up if load increases.

Re:Catering to SMEs

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I think they could target more customers if they sold Workstation as a security and recovery product, so it could provide firewalling, packet inspection and virus scanning outside of the guest OS.

'cos as it stands, *loads* of individuals and small companies will buy into virus protection, but they don't buy Workstation.... obviously the cost of Workstation as it stands is too high for these markets, and the product is overkill for these users anyway, but the services it provides could be useful.

Re:Catering to SMEs

[Groghunter]

in reply to your bullet points:
1. I've already done this a few times. there is a proccessor flag that has to be mokeyed with if you insist of moving it while the Guest is online, otherwise, just like any other move.
2. not sure what you're asking here.
3. Part of ESX. VMs can reside on all flavors of SAN, including iSCSI. Openfiler works great for this, and runs standard SMB shares as well.
4.One of the main features of VMWare View, which is what this client supports. you can turn on this functionality in standard VirtualCenter setups, to get this functionality for servers, but View is where it all comes together. imagine doing the same thing to your clients. when all the people log off at the end of the day, all their desktop VMs go idle, and VMware dynamically moves them to consolidate to a few servers, then shuts off the rest.
Cool stuff. just found out about the Sun solution for Desktop virtualization from this thread, though, and plan to do some research to see how it stacks up.

VMware and Open Source

[Comatose51]

VMware might not be a completely open source company but they've always been friendly towards open source software and make use of them. They've also contributed back as well such as extensions to the Linux kernel to make it run better as a guest in a paravirtualization environment, even though VMware can work using binary translation. They've also pushed heavily for an open VM format (OVF) so that users won't be locked into any specific virtualization vendor even though they're the dominant player in the market. They don't really see it as a zero-sum game. As long as virtualization as a whole keeps expanding, they benefit from it.

They also created and open sourced Review Board.

VMware is very engineer driven and engineers have a tendency to favor openness.

Re:VMware and Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes that is why I have to find a closed source "Winblows" box if I need to manage ESX. Why??. They even claim and have a web base console but it has never worked for anyone.

VMware, maybe it is time to give sometihng back instead of pushing your agenda against Micro$oft, I dont like them but am rooting for them just for this reason.

Re:VMware and Open Source

[scientus]

umm, qemu has has had a open disk format for years and vmware refuses to support it even with its converter, or even acknowledge it exists, instead they use their own format that they can make future platforms extend and have complete control over making other products incompatible with any images touched by a future vmware product at any point in time.

Re:VMware and Open Source

[scientus]

vmware doesnt even support completely raw disk images, ie mapped exactally to what it would be on a physical partition, despite that being of course the most open image format possible.

What it is...

[amcdiarmid]

It appears that (VMView) this is a client to connect to a virtualized machine (desktop) much in the same manner as the Citrix ICA client, but specifically for Linux.

The VMware Virtual Desktop Initiative (VDI) seems to have been renamed VMware View: Formerly, you had to use a paid for client (Citrix licensed?) to reach a hosted workstation. Your options were (correct in response please) use RDP clients (bad for sound), a Citrix-involved client (cost, but you can get video), or the VMware Infrastructure Console (VIC) which is a bit kludgy on the admin overhead.

The specifics for this is that you can have a non-admin user connect to hosted machines (linux or windows) from a linux box (thin client) at no additional cost. The play seems to be for thin client boxes to include the VMware View connector at no cost, eg: saturating the market.

The reason for this is likely to gain parity with Citrix's ubiquity on Thin Client Boxes. Up to now, thin clients tend to have some version of the Citrix ICA client, a version of the Microsoft RDP client, and perhaps a X client, and a 3270/5250 terminal emulator. With many thin client manufacturers going to Linux based thin clients, this is an easy way to get the VMware client on Thin Clients cheap.

You will still pay for the core product, but (hopefully) no longer will have to pay extra for the Thin Client necessary to run the VMware View (aka VDI) "system." For slashdot users, who buy Thin clients for $9 (used) this will have no effect. You will still have to kludge users into the remote users group on each workstation, and configure each thin client to connect to the correct virtualized machine.

This has no effect on Xen (Citrix Virtualization), or Hyper-V (Microsoft Virtualization), or ESX clusters, Workstation, or Server (VMWare Virtualization). All of those will still be host bound, except for ESX - which will allow virtual systems to be moved around to maximize physical host resources.

The big thing for me

[Sycraft-fu]

Is that VMWare just fucking works. We use it at work and I'm real happy with it over all. It does it's job and does it well. I use Workstation on my desktop for managing images of lab machines (you can clone right out of the VM back to physical hardware, don't need to sysprep or anything if you took the original VM using VMWare converter) and we have a VMWare enterprise server for running some various servers on. We are working on virtualizing more as time goes on.

I've played with other virtual solutions and I find them all lacking in comparison to VMWare. Some of it is in terms of user features. For example VMWare has an extremely robust and easy to use snapshot system in their Workstation version. Real useful if you are screwing around with software that might blow up your image, and it can branch if you start playing with multiple versions and such.

A larger part would be that VMware seems to work well with all OSes. It runs Windows happily, it runs Linux happily, it runs OpenSolairs happily, etc. All the OSes I've tried with it run well and problem free. That's not the case for others I've messed with. They work well with whatever their favored OS(es) is but they don't work well or at all with others. Xen seems to work real well provided you are wanting to do Linux on Linux, but has problems with Windows. The MS solution I haven't played with much yet but I'm going to bet it doesn't care for Linux at all.

As I alluded to earlier there's also how it deals with physical systems. VMWare has a program called VMWare Converter that'll nab an image of a physical computer, and convert it to virtual. Good for taking a system that needs to be virtualized but would be hard to reinstall. However it works real well the other way too. Symantec Ghost Solution Suite runs in VMWare fine and can take an image of the system. However you don't need to do that, GSS will read vmdk files directly. So you can go back from virtual to physical with ease. Also as I said when done right this works with no sysprep or any of that. So you build a base image on hardware and get the necessary drivers. You convert that to virtual. You then setup software in the VM, where you've got snapshots and the like in case something goes wrong. When that's good, hand teh VM disk to Ghost and have it push the image to all your client machines. This isn't theoretical, by the way, I do it all the time.

I could go on but you get the idea. They do things better than others, or that others don't do.

So while VMware certainly isn't the only game in town, it does seem to be the only one that does a really good job. The others are probably good if you are in a more limited situation. Like if you are an all Linux shop, ok maybe Xen is what you need. However if you've got a mix of OSes, or you need to mess with physical as well as virtual, or need advanced features, well then VMware is your best, and maybe only, solution.

That may not translate to world domination, but should ensure a solid market. There's money to be made in doing things real well.

Re:The big thing for me

[gbjbaanb]

you forgot the other feature the others don't have - the ability to "share" memory pages so you can fit more guests on a single server. Works especially well when you use a guest as a snapshot base for other guests.

Re:The big thing for me

[adisakp]

Is that VMWare just fucking works.

That's why went ahead and paid for the version 6 update to run on Vista (I had 5 on XP) even though I had VirtualBox running under Vista. VirtualBox is pretty good for simple stuff but it absolutely breaks down in some areas where VMWare rules - snapshot management for example. VirtualBox has very simple linear snapshots that it still manages to make confusing and can only revert destructively. VMWare has branching snapshots (and cloning) with the ability to non-destructively revert to any snapshot.

Re:The big thing for me

[b4dc0d3r]

You're obviously convinced that it works, and I agree it's a good product. From my experience, it did not do what I wanted, which is allow me to run a virtualized OS while continuing my normal desktop behavior (minus some CPU cycles of course).

I installed it and it installed network bridging which ground all traffic to a halt if I were doing anything other than simple web browsing. Under 1kbit/s no matter what, less than a bad dial-up modem. I did not want the virtual image to have any networking in the first place, and could not find any documentation to turn it off when installing. Removing VMWare did not solve the problem (my network settings were still modified), but when my computer died and I replaced it I vowed never to install VMWare again.

I did not keep my vow, and I learned a lesson. On my work notebook, I installed it for about 3 days. Uninstalling it completely broke all VPN-based communication. I tried reinstalling and uninstalling to see if I could overwrite and then wipe clean, but that had the same results. I had to manually reconfigure just about everything there is to configure on windows XP networking to get it working. One of our two VPN solutions still bluescreens when I use Outlook over it because I have not reinstalled windows yet.

Did I file a bug or ask for support? No, that's for loyalists like you, and I didn't pay for it. I found another solution that works for me. There's money to be made in not breaking things for your users.

Re:The big thing for me

[Anonymous Coward]

That stinks that this was your experience. But it sounds like a specific problem with your machine, and not one I've ever seen or encountered on the dozen of installs I've made.

What you want is exactly what I have with my VMWare Server (free) install. The virtual OSs I have running just sit there idling along unless I do something with them. I limit the RAM on them, and can run 2-3 with no problems on my 2gb laptop.

The only real time I feel it is if I have a CPU intensive app running in a guest, but of course that is to be expected.

Disconnecting a NIC or not having one for a guest is really easy (3 clicks?), so I'm not sure how far you dug into things. Perhaps VMWare is just too technical for you?

I want a Linux client for ESX!

[awpoopy]

There's about 25 pages on the forum with Linux IT people pleading for a Linux client. Maybe, just maybe, bringing on a "long time microsoft executive" as ceo wasn't such a good thing...maybe.

Re:I want a Linux client for ESX!

[kylearin]

I second that, and would like a Mac OS X native VIC as well. They developed Fusion, so we know they can... Some of us really do use Macs in our daily jobs!

R U kidding?

[hesaigo999ca]

> stave off Microsoft's dominance...
I am sorry, everyone knows VMWare had dominance, and never lost it for visualization.
M$ had to buy VirtualPC to compete, and even then could not make it work all that great.
They now improved on the technology with HyperVM, but have yet to transfer any client base from VMWare's list of clients, and therefor still have not come close to dominance.

I hate articles that are clueless about what they write, the writer wants to write a story about VMWare, but should stick with the facts, when they know nothing about the market shares involved.
This will just add to the great lead that VMWare has over any other in the field.

Re:R U kidding?

[WindBourne]

Mozilla vs MSIE. Mozilla was superior to MSIE in just about everyway and it was free for download. MSIE won because it was included. Superior products do not win unless on a neutral playing field. And Windows is not neutral when it is against MS.

Re:R U kidding?

[figleaf]

Netscape Communicator 4 was one of the worst browsers I have ever used.
Netscape shot themselves by not releasing Netscape Communicator 5 in time. Netscape 4.5 was just 4.08 repackaged.
By 1998, IE4 had already caught up and had better support for HTML, CSS and other recommendations than Netscape.

VMWare on the other hand has been consistently releasing new versions with excellent new features and have maintained their lead.
Superior products do win.

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh. Wasn't interested in VMWare before, and am less interested in it now. OSS and a business environment just don't have a good (read: reliable) history together.

Re:Meh

[palegray.net]

Yeah, just look at all those Linux and BSD boxes, crashing all the time. Good thing everyone uses almost nothing but Windows in their server farms these days.

Link to actual code (share and enjoy)

[Xenophon Fenderson,]

http://code.google.com/p/vmware-view-open-client/

You'd think that at least one of the technology news sites reporting this would link directly to the code, but you'd be wrong.

This is GREAT!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a VM running Win2k3 Server on each of my VMware ESX servers just so I can administer the damn thing with a real client (i.e. not the web-based one ... I can't get the console browser plugin working through an ssh-tunnel).

With the source code to the client out there, I assume a Linux offering will be in the works shortly. I'd love to remove my Windows VMs ... even if they do have great names like "windumb" and "winblows"

I'd also like to note my shock at VMware's goodwill in putting the thing out there with the LGPL. Bravo!

KVM and Proxmox VE

[erktrek]

maybe a little too late for me. I've gone with an alternative called "Proxmox VE" as a platform for VMs.

It's a slimmed Linux (?Debian?) install that uses KVM and Virtual Appliances and is managed with a nice easy web interface (similar too but simpler than Xen's with less features maybe). I am currently running a dev and a production server with no complaints (70+ days for the production server).

Some cool features include:
- paravirtualized drivers for Windows from Qumranet to speed up network/hd io (I running with these in XP and 2003). With Linux those drivers are built in.
- Live migration to another server on the network (have NOT tested this).
- VM Backups.
- Cluster management (not "clustering" AFAIK but I haven't done anything with this).
- Virtual Appliances (have not used these yet).

I don't know all the capabilities of vmware client so there might be some really cool stuff there. For my needs though Linux + KVM + the proxmox management interface works great.

You ain't just whistlin' Dixie, chum

[fnj]

I jumped ship to VirtualBox at the end of last year after being a long time VMWare Server user.

Server's switch to a terrible UI on version 2.0 and the fact that they continue to charge for VMWare fusion made me look for alternatives.

Mod parent up! VMware Server 2.0 with its vast bulk, instability, and ghastly browser based UI SUCKS DONKEY BALLS! I would have stayed with Server 1.0, but it won't install on any recent kernel.

They "fixed" what wasn't busted. Symptomatic of a company whose overall direction is getting close to death throes stage.

Re:You ain't just whistlin' Dixie, chum

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one that likes server 2.0? I have a couple of VM's running on it that I access across an vpn running on top of a T1, and the web plugin is just as responsive as an RDP session to the same machine. And the console isn't really slow. It's different because the interface can't use the right mouse to get properties like you could in server 1.x, but other then that, I like the changes.

Windows version of open source VMWare workstation

[Anonymous Coward]

VMWare has not impressed me with this news.

If they want to impress me, they would open source vmware workstation for windows host.

I read the article and went to the web site where it vmware client exists. There is source code nor binaries for windows. Where is it?

Look up "stave off"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Stave off": to keep something away or keep something from happening.
( http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/stave+off )

Yes, VMWare has dominance, that's why they are in a position to "stave off" Microsoft's [potential upcoming] dominance.

Multi-OS VM computer

[Tekoneiric]

I just want a computer with a virtualized BIOS/Mini parent OS at boot that would be able to run multiple operating systems at the same time while giving them semi-direct access to the hardware to increase the speed. The ability to tie a VM to a single processor core would be nice too.

Re:Multi-OS VM computer

[Slashcrap]

The ability to tie a VM to a single processor core would be nice too.

You can do that with ESX, and probably other solutions. Nobody does, because it's almost always a really shitty idea! What benefits are you hoping to achieve by limiting the hypervisor's ability to allocate resources?

The Plan

[travalas]

I think what VMware is open-sourcing relatively trivial products in their offerings that can only be used with their non-open-sourced products. They lose very little and gain the open-source distribution channels. i.e. vmware-view-open-client will end up probably end up in the Fedora/Ubuntu apt/yum repos. I think that was also the motivation behind open-vm-tools. Their ultimate goal being to use the apt and yum to maintain their hooks into the os and hopefully have the community maintain it. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth or anything.