VMware vSphere 5 Released

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Friday August 26, 2011 @04:38AM from the increment-versioncount dept.

Hitting the front page for the first time, earlytime writes "VMware released vSphere 5 yesterday. After much publicity about its new licensing scheme, techies worldwide get to take the new release for a spin and see if all of the new features are worth the fuss. From the article: 'VMware vSphere 5 supports virtual machines (VMs) that are up to four times more powerful than previous versions — VMs can now be configured with up to 1 terabyte of memory and 32 virtual CPUs ... VMware vSphere 5 also introduces three key new flagship features — Auto-Deploy, Profile-Driven Storage and Storage DRS — that extend the platform's unique datacenter resource management capabilities, delivering intelligent policy management to support an automated "set it and forget it" approach to managing datacenter resources, including server deployment and storage management. Customers can define policies and establish the operating parameters, and VMware vSphere 5 does the rest.'"

64 of 95 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

what happened to the mainframes? by alen · 2011-08-26 04:44 · Score: 1

vmware is almost like the old mainframes, but i don't hear about them anymore. do IBM and others want to stay out of this market?
1. Re:what happened to the mainframes? by MattW · 2011-08-26 04:58 · Score: 1
  
  How is VMware like mainframes? They were a hardware platform that became cumbersome to maintain for legacy software when the world moved on.
  VMware is a software platform that is designed to make other software platform-independent.
2. Re:what happened to the mainframes? by CannonballHead · 2011-08-26 05:00 · Score: 1
  
  Mainframes are still around, supported, and have relatively new ones out. I work for a part of IBM that has some software that runs on mainframe.
  It's not x86 though, whereas VMware is exclusively x86. Not being any sort of manager or sales person, I don't know why IBM doesn't work on more x86 stuff. :)
3. Re:what happened to the mainframes? by swamp+boy · 2011-08-26 05:01 · Score: 2
  
  Indeed IBM was one of the pioneers (and still is) in virtualization. IBM still has VM (now called z/VM) and some shops use it to run Linux on zSeries (mainframe).
  IBM also has some very impressive virtualization technology in their POWER series (combined pSeries and iSeries). Too bad they don't know how to market and compete as well as they should.
4. Re:what happened to the mainframes? by EXrider · 2011-08-26 05:40 · Score: 1
  
  do IBM and others want to stay out of this market?
  IBM pretty much invented Hypervisors with LPAR back in the 70's. They've been doing it way longer than VMware has however, IBM's solutions aren't nearly as affordable or practical for smaller companies tied to Microsoft products.
  
  --
  grep -iw skynet /etc/services
5. Re:what happened to the mainframes? by kmankmankman2001 · 2011-08-26 06:15 · Score: 1
  
  Clarification - Gene Amdahl, formerly of IBM, is the one that brought LPAR to the masses - Amdahl marketed it as Multiple Domain Facility (MDF). IBM was grudgingly forced to follow suit as customers quickly embraced MDF and it gave Amdahl a competitive advantage until IBM responded. IBM's implementation didn't (and still doesn't) include all of the features that MDF had, namely "L-shaped domains (or LPARs)". L-shaped domains allowed the customer to create an LPAR with a mix of dedicated and shared processors - something most customers found quite valuable (and still ask for). IBM *did* create VM back in the 60's though, and it's most modern variant, z/VM, is still running strong. Besides running the older "traditional" workloads of native VM apps and virtualizing VSE systems it's a popular Linux consolidation play in many shops.
  As to those that were commenting on the disappearance of the mainframe, IBM's 2011 second quarter shareholder report tells a different story. On the hardware side of things mainframe revenue increased 61% compared to Q2 2010 and shipped capacity increased 86%. That's a pretty healthy growth rate for anyone.
  
  --
  "The bigger the lie, the more they believe." - Det. Bunk
6. Re:what happened to the mainframes? by Zeromous · 2011-08-26 06:51 · Score: 1
  
  So you mean Watson wasn't a walking advertisement for Power7?
  
  --
  ---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
As a Mac user... by Necroman · 2011-08-26 04:55 · Score: 2

I've used ESXi servers for the last year or so. In the last 6 months I moved to having a Macbook as my primary development machine, and use the ESXi servers for hosting some linux VMs. My major issue has been that the vSphere client is Windows only, which meant I had to start up a Windows VM on my mac, the launch the vSphere client to manage my ESXi server.
With 5.0 they ALMOST fixed this, just now quite there. They included a nice web interface for managing just about everything on the system. But you still need a browser plugin to show the Console for your VM. This plugin requires the .Net framework, so it's windows only. So, once again, I'll still need to use windows to manage my system if I want to see the console state of my VMs.
I still don't understand why VMware, a company who's main technology is all built on Linux, chose to use a Windows only framework when building their management UI.

--
Its not what it is, its something else.
1. Re:As a Mac user... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-08-26 05:01 · Score: 1
  
  I still don't understand why VMware, a company who's main technology is all built on Linux, chose to use a Windows only framework when building their management UI.
  Because that is what their customer's understand. If their customer's understood Linux, they'd be using something like Xen or KVM/QEMU instead of VMware.
2. Re:As a Mac user... by IgnoramusMaximus · 2011-08-26 05:15 · Score: 1
  
  You are using a Mac and do not know about the Parallels Bare Metal (from the same folks who make the Parallels Desktop for Mac)?
  The thing is Linux based, has a Windows, OSX and Mac consoles and its cheaper then vSphere by a factor of 10 or so and requires no vCenter nonsense (its automation is cluster-based and distributed across hosts - the only sane approach in a VM datacenter!)
  Oh and the VM format is compatible with the Mac version of Parallels.
3. Re:As a Mac user... by techwrench · 2011-08-26 05:18 · Score: 1
  
  I don't use Mac, so YMMV.... There is a way to use VM Player to access the console of Virtual Machines by logging into the ESXi web interface with VMP. I believe the command is: 'vmplayer -h ' through a CLI. Google is your friend here.
  
  --
  It's You and I against the World... When do we attack?
4. Re:As a Mac user... by unencode200x · 2011-08-26 06:15 · Score: 1
  
  VMware would definitely say that the vmkernel used by their current hypervisor ESXi is not built on Linux.
  
  The management VM that loads up after the vmkernel uses BusyBox nowadays. Also, it's been a while, but if I recall their initial product was VMware workstation and ran on Windows.
  
  --
  
  Chance favors the prepared mind.
  Perfect is the enemy of good.
5. Re:As a Mac user... by sarhjinian · 2011-08-26 06:24 · Score: 1
  
  On Linux you can do this to view the ESXi guest's console, so you might be able to on the Mac as well. What you can't do is edit the VM, for which you need vSphere Client.
  
  --
  --srj/mmv
6. Re:As a Mac user... by sarhjinian · 2011-08-26 06:27 · Score: 1
  
  Their main technology isn't built on Linux. ESX (not ESXi) has a Linux personality that can be used to administer the host, but it's not a Linux kernel-based like Xen or KVM.
  That said, you can use vCLI instead of the vSphere Client, but the GUI really is quicker for many one-off tasks.
  
  --
  --srj/mmv
7. Re:As a Mac user... by iCEBaLM · 2011-08-26 06:34 · Score: 1
  
  ESXi (vSphere Hypervisor) is free.
8. Re:As a Mac user... by nabsltd · 2011-08-26 06:36 · Score: 1
  
  The thing is Linux based, has a Windows, OSX and Mac consoles and its cheaper then vSphere by a factor of 10 or so and requires no vCenter nonsense (its automation is cluster-based and distributed across hosts - the only sane approach in a VM datacenter!)
  With no functional live migration, no storage migration, no support for high availability without adding Red Hat clustering, no equivalent to DRS, no distributed networking, and a bunch of other "no's", Parallels Bare Metal includes only 1/10th of the features of the full-blown vSphere, so it only makes sense that it is 1/10th the cost.
  Also, the ESXi hypervisor is free, and pretty much does everything that Parallels Bare Metal does. And, once you start spending $1000, vSphere becomes the clear winner.
9. Re:As a Mac user... by Eric+Green · 2011-08-26 06:41 · Score: 1
  
  Thing is, neither Xen nor KVM/QEMU are as capable as VMware for the things that VMware is good at. For example, it's typical in the VMware world to create a VMFS volume on an EMC block storage server and use this for virtual machine migration between physical hosts. This works because VMFS is a clustered file system that has some unique attributes that make it good for hosting virtual disk files (it's extent-based, for example, so it will keep the extents of a virtual disk contiguous, meaning that the elevator algorithm for disk management inside your VM actually works and you get close to real-world disk performance). Migrating a virtual machine is literally as easy as stopping it on host A and starting it on host B. I can't do anything of the sort with Xen or KVM/QEMU. Then there's VCenter, which provides a central GUI to manage an entire network's worth of virtual machines.
  Don't get me wrong, I despise VSphere. I curse it every time I use it, and I've attempted a Xen or KVM/QEMU migration multiple times to get away from it. I had hoped that the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with its fairly up-to-date KVM support, GFS cluster filesystem support, etc., could allow me to replace VSphere in our shop. Unfortunately to get adequate disk performance I ended up having to create LVM volumes to use as VM raw disks, qcow2 on top of any currently-existing Linux filesystem is a disaster. And once you're in the realm of LVM volumes, you're beyond any management tools available for managing KVM - not to mention that the way Linux volume groups currently work, you can't share the same volume group between multiple hosts because Things Go Badly, meaning you can't do the trick that VMware uses to do rapid migration via simply turning off the VM on system A and turning it back on, on system B. (There's some state storage required to do it seamlessly, but again, that's all handled by the shared storage).
  So yes, I know Linux (I mean c'mon, I've been using Slashdot since before it had user ID's!) and how to use Xen and KVM/QEMU. But no, they're competitive with VSphere in the enterprise environment only in a limited set of circumstances, and stating that the only reason to use VSphere is "ignorance" is, itself, ignorance.
  
  --
  Send mail here if you want to reach me.
10. Re:As a Mac user... by Znork · 2011-08-26 07:20 · Score: 1
  
  "I can't do anything of the sort with Xen or KVM/QEMU."
  Ive done it for five years without any trouble. Stay away from GFS, but raw volumes, VM-attached iscsi disks or drbd offer varying levels of featurism for underlying storage (and on Xen, raw volumes give me 2-3x the performance I've gotten out of VMFS volumes). Yes, you may need to write a few scripts to manage it seamlessly but once you have it beats firing up the ESX console for every little thing.
11. Re:As a Mac user... by Necroman · 2011-08-26 07:32 · Score: 1
  
  I'm a remote developer and my VM is running in a lab next to a NFS server. I have to do frequent re-installs of the linux VMs I run (our product is a linux distro, so to deploy new builds, I basically re-image the VMs). Doing that over the internet would eat up a lot of unneeded bandwidth and would be rather slow. This way I can do things really quickly.
  
  --
  Its not what it is, its something else.
12. Re:As a Mac user... by Eric+Green · 2011-08-26 08:36 · Score: 1
  
  A new iscsi volume for each VM is certainly one approach, and actually that's sort of what we're doing with the ESXi VM's -- they have a boot disk on VMFS on an iSCSI volume, and the VM then mounts an iSCSI volume off the SAN for their actual data. And you are certainly correct that it is *technically* feasible to do it with KVM, I have in fact done it -- for a one-off prototype. The pain I endured doing that basically told me that there was no way in BLEEP that this was a supportable solution in the field deployed at customer sites that lack dedicated IT resources.
  The ESX console, BTW, isn't necessary for a lot of things if you enable the ssh on your ESXi hosts. vim-cmd is your friend. With an appropriate oem.tgz you can even set up your keys so you can script it from outside. The only time I fire up the VSphere GUI in a VirtualBox Windows VM on my Macbook Pro is when I need to see the actual console (as vs. use rdesktop to a Windows VM or vnc to a Linux VM).
  
  --
  Send mail here if you want to reach me.
13. Re:As a Mac user... by IgnoramusMaximus · 2011-08-26 08:59 · Score: 1
  
  With no functional live migration, no storage migration, no support for high availability without adding Red Hat clustering, no equivalent to DRS, no distributed networking, and a bunch of other "no's", Parallels Bare Metal includes only 1/10th of the features of the full-blown vSphere, so it only makes sense that it is 1/10th the cost.
  
  Storage migration and VM migration are supported via a number of methods, including on-disk conversion of virtual machines, guest OS agent software, etc.
  As to the rest, of course, none of these things are supported by ESXi unless you get vSphere and pay through your nose.
  Red had clustering and GFS in Parallels is also a no-cost option.
  
  Also, the ESXi hypervisor is free, and pretty much does everything that Parallels Bare Metal does. And, once you start spending $1000, vSphere becomes the clear winner.
  
  No it does not "do everything Parallels Bare Metal does" since most of its functionality is crippled without vCenter.
  As to the cost ... right. A minimum 2 host HA capable system with vSphere will set you back at least $6k vs Parallels at $2k or even $1k (the small business edition that does not have fancy automation).
  Also, the Parallels Bare Metal v5 (currently in beta) has most of the features of the ESX 3 series including vCenter, which is more then enough for most shops.
  What Parallels does not have is all the pretty GUIs for all the features above, which I guess is your real problem.
14. Re:As a Mac user... by TarpaKungs · 2011-08-26 09:04 · Score: 1
  
  From 4.x you can run Windows as a guest VM, and deploy VCenter on this. Then do an RDP desktop share to your MAC.
  
  --
  Why can't women be like Hedy Lamarr - beautiful, talented and inventors of frequency-hopping spread-spectrum techn
15. Re:As a Mac user... by IgnoramusMaximus · 2011-08-26 09:09 · Score: 1
  
  If you mean my comment about the ability to run the Parallels Bare Metal VMs in the Parallels Desktop, that is just a bonus feature that would allow you to experiment on VMs locally or perform all sorts of maintenance tasks away from the main server. It does not mean that you would be forced to run them there. You can still do all the work the same way you operate now, except with Parallels Bare Metal you get a native Mac client console to remotely control the Parallels host with, very much like the one VMWare used to do for Linux in the early days before they went "mainstream" and started to piss on all non-Windows users.
16. Re:As a Mac user... by IgnoramusMaximus · 2011-08-26 09:18 · Score: 1
  
  LOL. Yes, I am sure all holier-than-thou ACs like you are 100% typo-free by definition and never rush or post on Slashdot from a tablet with an auto-correct on ...
  That is probably why ACs are so famous on Slashdot for being the source of reliable, sage advice! No?
17. Re:As a Mac user... by ejoe_mac · 2011-08-26 09:31 · Score: 1
  
  Console is a VNC session - so you just need to connect to the port in the correct way. I know some folks who do it already, so it's got to be written somewhere.
18. Re:As a Mac user... by drsmithy · 2011-08-26 09:36 · Score: 1
  
  Thing is, neither Xen nor KVM/QEMU are as capable as VMware for the things that VMware is good at. For example, it's typical in the VMware world to create a VMFS volume on an EMC block storage server and use this for virtual machine migration between physical hosts. This works because VMFS is a clustered file system that has some unique attributes that make it good for hosting virtual disk files (it's extent-based, for example, so it will keep the extents of a virtual disk contiguous, meaning that the elevator algorithm for disk management inside your VM actually works and you get close to real-world disk performance). Migrating a virtual machine is literally as easy as stopping it on host A and starting it on host B. I can't do anything of the sort with Xen or KVM/QEMU. Then there's VCenter, which provides a central GUI to manage an entire network's worth of virtual machines.
  I don't know if you're just explaining this horrendously badly, or you really don't understand, but live migrations don't require stopping a VM to move it.
  Xen has supported live migration for at least the last five years, I used to do it all the time on our home-rolled Xen clusters (before we migrated to VMware). I assume KVM does too, but I've never used it.
  
  Don't get me wrong, I despise VSphere. I curse it every time I use it, and I've attempted a Xen or KVM/QEMU migration multiple times to get away from it. I had hoped that the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with its fairly up-to-date KVM support, GFS cluster filesystem support, etc., could allow me to replace VSphere in our shop. Unfortunately to get adequate disk performance I ended up having to create LVM volumes to use as VM raw disks, qcow2 on top of any currently-existing Linux filesystem is a disaster. And once you're in the realm of LVM volumes, you're beyond any management tools available for managing KVM - not to mention that the way Linux volume groups currently work, you can't share the same volume group between multiple hosts because Things Go Badly, meaning you can't do the trick that VMware uses to do rapid migration via simply turning off the VM on system A and turning it back on, on system B. (There's some state storage required to do it seamlessly, but again, that's all handled by the shared storage).
  I agree the management tools - particularly the "default" ones - are atrociously bad on Linux (and this is true pretty much across the board, not just for virtualisation). However, it is quite possible to share a VG across multiple Linux hosts (again, did it for years) using Clustered LVM. With that said, when clvm falls over, it falls over *hard* and usually requires rebooting hosts to recover (assuming it doesn't reboot them for your).
19. Re:As a Mac user... by Eric+Green · 2011-08-26 10:35 · Score: 1
  
  Do note that my development platform is Fedora 15 / Gnome 3 running KVM VM's of the various target distributions for the product, so I'm clearly familiar enough to use it every day. But I suppose yes and no, because I stopped my investigations into replacing ESXi with KVM or Xen when I ran into a couple of show-stopper issues. The first one was with KVM stability, basically there is a feature we needed that KVM supposedly supports, but KVM regularly kernel panics if we try to use it. I tried at least three different distributions -- Fedora 15, RHEL6, and the latest Ubuntu -- and ran into the same problem with each of them. The second was with distribution Xen support. The only distribution that had a version of Xen new enough to support the functionality we needed was OpenSUSE 11.3, hardly what I would call a stable distribution, and then OpenSUSE 11.4 broke Xen. Any other distribution would have required that we create a new DOM0 kernel and update the Xen runtime utilities and QEMU in DOM0 (note that Xen uses QEMU for its HVM virtualization). *PLUS* write an entirely new virtualization management infrastructure, since libvirtd doesn't support the functionality of Xen that we needed.
  Meanwhile ESXi 4.1 Just Works(tm). An attribute that I appreciate more and more as I get older (thus why this is being typed from a Macbook Pro, the only laptop that doesn't annoy me with a palm-surfing trackpad, clunky keyboard, or ridiculously short battery life). So, let's see, where do I want to put several man-months of my time -- into creating actual product that can be sold, or into futzing with Xen? In the end it's a no-brainer, putting the man-months into the product results in a more functional and faster product, whereas putting the man-months into Xen in order to get away from ESXi is just a cheaper product, not a better one -- and price isn't our selling point, functionality and performance is.
  
  --
  Send mail here if you want to reach me.
20. Re:As a Mac user... by QuantumRiff · 2011-08-26 15:17 · Score: 1
  
  With VSphere 4, you have to run the actual VCenter server (the software that actually controls the ESXi machines) on windows too.. which is really annoying..
  
  --
  
  What are we going to do tonight Brain?
21. Re:As a Mac user... by drsmithy · 2011-08-27 01:27 · Score: 1
  
  Oh, I'm not trying to argue anything else out there is better than ESXi, far from it. Just making the point that your original post was a bit lacking in accuracy.
22. Re:As a Mac user... by IgnoramusMaximus · 2011-08-27 17:08 · Score: 1
  
  Ridiculous AC troll nonsense.
  I have thousands of posts here and if they were all consistently having "then" instead of "than" ... then you'd have a point.
  As it is you are just another attention-starved nitpicking jackass.
  Be gone.
23. Re:As a Mac user... by Cramer · 2011-08-29 07:57 · Score: 1
  
  Not when connected to vCenter. As a single, standalone host, yes, it can be used for free. *BUT* most of the features of a VMware host are unavailable. (and btw, ESXi is all that's available now. The traditional linux console based ESX is gone. And yes, I bitched about that during beta... to controll it one must either install such a console or enable the "debug" TSM [tech support mode])
24. Re:As a Mac user... by Cramer · 2011-08-29 08:00 · Score: 1
  
  ... but they are steadily moving towards greater linux support.
  That's bull. When was the last release of the vCenter on Linux beta? 2007? There's no tools installer for Debian releases. (etc.)
25. Re:As a Mac user... by Cramer · 2011-08-29 08:07 · Score: 1
  
  ESX was a Redhat Enterprise Linux install that bootstrapped the vmkernel (vmunix) which then migrated the console to a VM. ESXi direct boots the vmkernel. This saves the disk and memory of the esxconsole and boots the system faster. (and presumably means they don't have to pay Redhat any royalties??? also, there's no linux installation to keep patched.)
26. Re:As a Mac user... by swalve · 2011-08-30 12:10 · Score: 1
  
  "Architect" is not a verb.
Re:WTF IS THIS ADVERTISEMENT ARTICLE BULLSHIT? by Scutter · 2011-08-26 04:56 · Score: 3, Insightful

I didn't see this kind of rage when the new Linux kernel release hit the front page of Slashdot on Sunday. How about when the Fedora 16 release was announced on Tuesday? Or when KDE Frameworks 5.0 development was announced? Must be tough to be so focused on only what matters to YOU and not what might be of interest to anyone else.

--

"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Excuse me? by JustAnotherIdiot · 2011-08-26 04:57 · Score: 1

Last I checked, information on the release of a newer product that lets you create and manage virtual machines is both news and very nerdy.
Please think next time you type.

--
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Set it and forget it? Yeah right. by sandytaru · 2011-08-26 04:58 · Score: 1

I spent my last two weeks recovering two "set it and forget it" backup servers - one had the RAID controller fail (which was reported as a HDD failure so what should have been a 30 second hot swap turned into a two week RMA nightmare) and the other had the OS get corrupted from routine patches, killing our remote access and requiring a clean install from scratch.

Anything that advertises itself as "configure and ignore" should be marked with a disclaimer "Actually ignoring your software or hardware for long periods of time is asking for disaster. Check it weekly anyway."

--
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Wheres the link? by SmoothBreaker · 2011-08-26 05:01 · Score: 2

I'm ok with Slashdot stories as advertising... I guess... but if something like this is posted, at least include a direct link to the products page.
Re:WTF IS THIS YELLING by jeffmeden · 2011-08-26 05:03 · Score: 1

I will second what another poster said: Some people (nearly everyone who works in the medium/large datacenter space) uses VMware for many mission critical apps. That being said, anyone who cares already knew all about this weeks ago. But, it is still fun to see the /. community's perspective on licensing and new features.
Re:No thanks by Anonymous Coward · 2011-08-26 05:05 · Score: 1

In a subsequent press release VMWare stated:
"After some initial feedback from our customers we have decided not to bother to release it. No, it was not thousands of our customers. Yes, it was a single party. No, it was not Google, Oracle, IBM, or Bank of America. It was an anonymous poster on a popular tech web site. We should have consulted this individual before sinking millions of dollars in R&D and should have abandoned our typical business plan by releasing the product for free to the general public. It is clear that we have been short-sighted by not considering the needs of the casual computer user who needs to 32 instances on Windows in order to process their yearly taxes or send their Yahoo! e-mail messages. We thank you for your time and will update our shareholders at the next AGM."
VMWare Licensing by AltImage · 2011-08-26 05:45 · Score: 2

VMWare licensing practices are horrible. I have used Zimbra (paid version) for 6+ years. VMWare buys them from Yahoo and my bill triples. From $2500k/quarter to $2600/month.
1. Re:VMWare Licensing by Thing+1 · 2011-08-26 10:12 · Score: 1
  
  From $2500k/quarter to $2600/month.
  Unless it's a typo, it sounds like you reduced your expenses by over an order of magnitude; about 31 times, to be exact.
  
  --
  I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
2. Re:VMWare Licensing by AltImage · 2011-08-26 12:22 · Score: 1
  
  We use the paid version because of Mobile Sync and Outlook Connector. Now we're using the Zimbra open source version with Funambol to achieve the same thing. At $2500/quarter, it was worth the price for the occasional support request and not having to run and maintain Funambol along side Zimbra....triple my price and suddenly the hassle isn't that big of a deal.
3. Re:VMWare Licensing by Cramer · 2011-08-29 08:11 · Score: 1
  
  When did 2600 become 3 x 2500? (I'll assume the "k" is a typo)
4. Re:VMWare Licensing by AltImage · 2011-08-29 08:24 · Score: 1
  
  $2500 per QUARTER vs $2600 per MONTH
Resource usage vs RedHat/KVM by diegocg · 2011-08-26 05:47 · Score: 2

VMware vSphere 5 supports virtual machines (VMs) that are up to four times more powerful than previous versions -- VMs can now be configured with up to 1 terabyte of memory and 32 virtual CPUs.
In Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Beta 3 (yes, it's a beta, still...), based in KVM: supporting up to 128 logical CPUs and 2TB memory for hosts, and up to 64 vCPUs and 2TB memory for guests
1. Re:Resource usage vs RedHat/KVM by dave562 · 2011-08-26 07:45 · Score: 1
  
  Both VMware and KVM are overkill. How many hosts have enough RAM to give each guest 1TB, much less 2TB? Wake me up when the hardware catches up to the point where those capabilities matter.
2. Re:Resource usage vs RedHat/KVM by dissy · 2011-08-26 08:02 · Score: 1
  
  Both VMware and KVM are overkill. How many hosts have enough RAM to give each guest 1TB, much less 2TB? Wake me up when the hardware catches up to the point where those capabilities matter.
  *poke*poke* It's your "hardware is ready" courtesy wake up call.
  You can get some mid-range IBM blade centers, or some low end HP BladeSystem hardware, or really any of the many many systems that can easily handle that in a low end configuration.
  If you need to get serious, you start loading rack cabinets with such gear, along with some SAN cards sprinkled throughout.
  At that level of hardware, it would be extremely wasteful not to run something like VMware ESX. This is the target audience after all, not the geek with a lowly double digit count of CPUs in their spare bedroom.
  Granted, it was extremely nice of them to release ESXi without vSphere for free for us lowly geeks who, like myself, might only have a couple 4 or 6 core home built systems, who don't need all those high end features (*drool* none the less), but when I'm at work running the "little big iron", I'm very thankful for vSphere and such solutions to manage my hardware with 36 GB ram per node and a 480 gb SAN.
3. Re:Resource usage vs RedHat/KVM by dave562 · 2011-08-26 08:07 · Score: 1
  
  I'm very thankful for vSphere and such solutions to manage my hardware with 36 GB ram per node and a 480 gb SAN.
  I think you mean TB and not GB?
  So vSphere sees the entire blade chassis as a single host?
4. Re:Resource usage vs RedHat/KVM by Tvingo · 2011-08-26 08:59 · Score: 1
  
  We're currently evaluating RHEV as a VMWare replacement due to the high cost of VMWare deployment. Just doesn't make sense to keep bleeding money for the same capabilities that RHEV can provide for about 20-30% of the price.
  
  --
  Nothing i have to say is worth saying.
5. Re:Resource usage vs RedHat/KVM by dissy · 2011-08-26 13:28 · Score: 1
  
  I think you mean TB and not GB?
  Doh! Yea for storage I meant TB. I'll blame that one on it being Friday ;}
  
  So vSphere sees the entire blade chassis as a single host?
  Not really. Each blade is it's own server, but what vSphere does is use each blades resources and builds a pool of total available resources.
  You allocate virtual machines out of that pool.
  Unfortunately a VMs RAM can not exceed that of the host it runs on.
  If the max you have is say 48gb in 4 of the 16 blades the other 12 only having 32gb, the largest amount of RAM you can give to a VM is actually about 47.9gb (ESXi doesn't use that much ram, but I'm not sure the exact value at the moment.)
  Also you can not have more than 4 VMs with that much RAM allocated, because then you are out of those blades and your largest amount is 31.9gb.
  CPU cycles can be shared over multiple cores and cpus on a single blade, but I don't believe they can use multiple different blades for that. It would be painfully slow if so.
  Storage space is about all you can utilize the entire SAN for, but generally one prefers a SAN for its flexibility in carving up that storage for multiple machines in an effective way.
  Internally it does do a bit of RAM sharing, but that's mainly for the hot failover to another blade/host. If one host dies, the VMs all get moved nearly instantly to other hosts/blades. When using the VM, say while typing into a terminal based IRC client, or remote desktoped into a win2k3 server, you only feel about a 200ms network burp and maybe a 30ms 'freeze' of the guest VM, but then everything is back to normal. It has to keep live copies of memory in other blades for it to switch over so fast, even if only treated as cache memory until needed for a higher priority task like a VM needing it.
  You of course can flag the RAM as guaranteed, in case a malloc failure is not an option. In that case all of the guaranteed RAM shows as used on the host, and as I mentioned you can only setup 4 such VMs in the above example setup.
  If you only guarantee say 12 GB of that RAM but still allocate it 48 GB, then the host will show 12 GB more used and the rest it gives if it has it the other times it's shared.
  If you only guarantee enough RAM for the OS to sit idle and share the rest, you could have 16 or more VMs on one blade and rarely have problems.
  Some things virtualize much better than other things.
  The best part of the RAM allocating is that you can assign the VM as much RAM as you want the guest to think it has. Only non-free ram in the guest is actually used on the host, so the free ram is shared among VMs.
  This is *extremely* nice for servers that sit idle for 98% of the time, but for the time they are not idle, they could possibly run a job that could use a little or a ton of RAM.
  Assuming no memory leaks in your app (hah yea) then you can give a VM 48 GB RAM and know that if the kernel userland and daemon(s) only use 1 GB ram when idle, then 98% of the time the host only shows 1 GB being used and the other 47 GB is free to be used on other machines for when they spike and do the same thing.
  If you are running the guest tools, then your kernel is already patched to gracefully handle requesting a block of memory that should be free but just happens not to be on the host that moment.
  Those are the main upsides. You can guarantee a 100% uptime from the "hardware" side of things for your guest. The kernel will never again be unexpectedly shut down due to a normal hardware failure.
  We use RAID to help protect from eventual disk failures, and using VMs like this on a blade system helps to protect against failures of the components: Hard Drive, RAM (cell or whole stick), CPU(s), motherboards, and power supplies.
  As long as you feed it power, it RUNS.
  (Granted, your OS has to support this feature to make best use of it *glares at a certain OS that requests reboots after user-land changes* :
6. Re:Resource usage vs RedHat/KVM by dave562 · 2011-08-27 17:40 · Score: 1
  
  Thanks for the depth to your reply. I have been wondering about the realities of over committing RAM in production environments. With applications that use it to cache, like database servers, I would imagine that the ratio of used to unused RAM makes it one of the less optimal candidates for virtualization. Has that been your experience?
  So far I've only worked with the free version of ESXi and virtualized about a dozen workloads. They're mostly web with a small amount of database, both MS and OSS (Apache / MySQL). Although it's SAN backed, I haven't had to mess with passing RDMs into the guests yet. The user counts on the guests aren't requiring enough IOPS to really optimize the disk geometries and RAID levels yet.
  Threads like this are why I like /. and why I think this site will remain relevant for a while. For any given technical thread, there are experts in the field who are qualified to comment on it. Very few communities can count on participation on that level.
Linux client? Please? by CoolVibe · 2011-08-26 05:48 · Score: 1

Wake me up when they have a working vSphere client for Linux.
1. Re:Linux client? Please? by jon3k · 2011-08-28 08:06 · Score: 1
  
  So do what everyone else does, run a virtualized copy of Windows 7 on your workstation and install the Virtual Infrastructure Client.
2. Re:Linux client? Please? by CoolVibe · 2011-08-30 08:48 · Score: 1
  
  That sucks. I would rather have a native client. Running a VM on your local box just to run vSphere is what I find a bit excessive. The vSphere is in .NET, it shouldn't be that hard to port that over to Mono or something...
3. Re:Linux client? Please? by jon3k · 2011-08-30 09:06 · Score: 1
  
  you dont have to run it locally, we run a windows 7 guest in vmware and load any windows tools we need. it also means i can access it from home when I vpn in if I need to.
4. Re:Linux client? Please? by CoolVibe · 2011-08-30 12:39 · Score: 1
  
  Then you move the problem remotely. It would still be more efficient to run a native client over a VPN. Now you are doing a RDP session over a slow VPN in which you are doing another remote session in vSphere. They have clients for Mac OS X. Why do they leave out Linux? Or any other *nix variant for that matter? If they have any love for the community, they would port their client over, or give us very detailed protocol specs (or an API, for that matter), so we can write our own client.
5. Re:Linux client? Please? by jon3k · 2011-09-01 11:49 · Score: 1
  
  It works great, I do it all the time. The only thing that sucks is using the guest console, but you're usually only in it long enough to put a network address on something and ssh/rdp into it. But to answer your question, I assume like everyone else who doesn't write linux software, it doesn't represent a large enough base of their users to justify the expenditure.
Re:Worth every penny! by armanox · 2011-08-26 06:05 · Score: 1

Maybe it'll be able to run Vista smoothly at that point.

--
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
I upgraded my install by forgottenusername · 2011-08-26 06:21 · Score: 1

Oddly the version I'm running is called 'KVM'. It's got lots of features and is free.. thanks, vmware!
Re:I wonder how it compares by Anarke_Incarnate · 2011-08-26 06:27 · Score: 1

According to our rep, it is actually even less than VS4.x
Bias, not product by bill_mcgonigle · 2011-08-26 07:03 · Score: 1

delivering intelligent policy management to support an automated "set it and forget it" approach to managing datacenter resources, including server deployment and storage management. Customers can define policies and establish the operating parameters, and VMware vSphere 5 does the rest.'
Linux, Fedora, and KDE stories aren't littered with meaningless marketing bullshit like this. A good Slashdot submission might explain some of the tech that inspired that blather, but this isn't a good one. I'd be annoyed if we got a Fedora story with this sort of nonsense to - it's not the product, it's the bias.

--
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Re:Thank you Rob for everything! by silverglade00 · 2011-08-26 07:52 · Score: 1

Somebody want to vMotion this back where it belongs? I can't afford the license...
Re:WTF IS THIS ADVERTISEMENT ARTICLE BULLSHIT? by 3nails4aFalseProphet · 2011-08-26 09:34 · Score: 1

I'm one of those who uses VMware on a daily basis, and who is interested to see how others are receiving the release of 5.0. I'm currently running 4.1 on a group of 6 physical servers. VMs automagically migrating from one host to another based on resource requirements was pretty cool, storage vmotion was even better. With 5.0 I'm really looking forward to trying out the storage DRS, which was the logical next step.

--
/*Insert boring sig here*/