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[gizz72]

Greetings,
An email I got for invitation for VMWare came. I'll paste the details below. Just tell me what you all think of VMWare?

<email>
IBM Xseries Server & vmware esx help customers win in the market place by simplifying their IT infrastructure through server consolidation. The combination of the two solutions is designed for server consolidation, rapid deployment of new servers, availability, and simplified management - - helping to improve hardware utilization, save space, IT staffing and hardware costs.

Through self-managing technologies, a scalable server architecture, and end-to-end solutions, IBM & vmware esx can help you "do more with less," freeing up resources, reducing costs and complexities, and managing multiple workload requirements.

Real Cost Savings to customers by allowing them to reduce the number of physical hardware units and thereby, save floor space, rack space, and power consumption; simplify the administration work of maintaining dissimilar operating systems and applications that require their own OS instance.
Highly Scalable & Flexible with VMware ESX Server*, you can enable dynamic, logical partitioning on your IBM xSeries™ systems. Instead of deploying multiple servers scattered around your company and running a single application on each, you can consolidate the physical servers into one or two big servers that are configured for high availability. This enhances system availability and flexibility at the same time because big servers are designed for scalability and expansion.
Centralized IT Management VMware allows one point of administrative control over multiple operating systems and applications.
High Availability These virtual machines are completely isolated from one another, if one virtual machine were to crash (e.g. for software reasons), the other virtual machines are not affected. In particular, when a new application is being introduced that is running older applications, housing the new application within a virtual machine insulates its behavior from disturbing the other applications.
Safe & Convenient Migration Migrating an application from one virtual machine running an older OS into another virtual machine running the upgraded OS does not require any physical interruption of operations. Physical network connections are not affected. The migration act is controlled from the console.
</email>

Tell me your opinion. Thanks to all.

[Jope]

What on earth does this have to do with the Amiga?

My opinion:

VMWare Workstation works well, it also seems faster than Connectix/MS Virtual PC. I've evaluated both on the same hardware and VMWare was a lot quicker in getting the OSes installed, etc. VMWare also provides OS extensions (and the actual VM) for Linux, which Virtual PC doesn't..

VMWare's virtual network is also a lot more customizable, but I've heard many reports of it's DHCP server starting to broadcast on the wrong interface, screwing up a few corporate lan segments until it was tracked down and disabled.

If you intend to virtualize Linux, I'd say go for VMWare.. OTOH if you intend to virtualize Windows (and the host is Windows), you ought to evaluate Virtual PC as well. Both give out a demo version if you're really interested.

I don't have that much ESX Server experience, but from what I've tried it, it seems quite nice as a virtualization platform.. It's basically Linux with the VMWare ESX software running on top.. You see the virtual machine's video with a remote console application and you can manipulate the actual VM Host and the VM's with a browser UI..

Now then, your turn: are you affiliated with VMWare or why did you paste the ad to Amiga.org?

[whabang]

VMWare is a nice tool for emulating machines. IMO it's far better than Bochs. I
haven't tried VirtualPC for years, though.

[gizz72]

@Jope
No, I'm not affiliated to any of this. It's an invitation. There're going to introduce VMWare to our company and other clients as well. Don't know much about it, but what I can see, I would like to share this to the community as well to get a few glimps of what it is. I've seen snapshots of Liunx running windows 98. AROS, I believe is considered VMWare too in that category. At least I need to know more on linux. I hardly have experience with such OS(linux) yet.
Thanks for the opinion Jope. :-D

[bloodline]

I use VMware almost exclusivly for testing AROS without having to reboot my machine.

A couple of AROS devs use VMWare to run linux within windows.

Personally I rather like it.

[adolescent]

I have an old student copy of VMWare Workstation on my home machine. It's nice for running the odd Windows app that just won't work under WINE. Only nag I have about it is the lack of real disk support. (ie. I want to install Windows into a seperate disk not a hard file.) Although it appears you can do this, nothing ever gets written to the disk, it all goes into a temporary hard file. Odd...

[Jope]

IMO it's far better than Bochs

It's bound to be - you're talking about two different approaches to the problem:

VMWare (and Virtual PC for Windows) run the virtual machines with the native CPU
Bochs emulates the entire computer from the CPU to all the hardware (and thus also runs on non-x86 hardware)

Guess which is the faster approach.. :-)

The bochs team also don't really advertise their software as a virtual PC, but rather an OS debugging/teaching tool, as you can step through your code instruction by instruction.

[Sparky]

Hi there,

We use VMware a lot. It does work very well indeed, you can have lots of virtual systems on the same physical hardware (ala mainframe), however!

It might not be such a good idea to run critical applications off of those virtual machines, the reason being that they are all reliant on the hardware and OS underneath, should that hardware or host OS drop dead then you don't end up with one system down you end up with ten! Or twenty or thirty! (depending how many client OS's you install)

That said we use IBM hardware (funny that what with us being IBM an all :-) and they are REALLY nicely built and not your el-cheapo build it at home job PC, they are 4 CPU, 16Gb RAM, SAN backend and nicely engineered ... but they do still fail .. this week we had one of the gig-ethernet board die ... required an outage of the whole system to fix as the Linux host OS doesn't support hot swap PCI (yes I know the Linux now supports it, but the one IBM use is about Redhat 7 level .. which is a supported configuration so no changing it)

The moral of the whole VMware thing is ... Buy the best hardware you can if you are going to use it.

Regards

[that_punk_guy]

bloodline wrote:
Personally I rather like it.

+1 :-)

[gizz72]

That's nice everyone, but just another thing. How many OS's does a VMWare can run, I mean if read correctly 12 or 20 plus++ in one machine running a the same time? Does it affect performance when running different other OSes? (RETHAT + DEBIAN + BEos + Aros + UAE(probably) + Etc...) Is that possible on one machine? Just curious? :-?

[adolescent]

You can run as many virtual machines as your system can handle. For instance, my AMD XP 1800+ can run a single WinXP virtual machine on top of the native Linux without stuffing it up. If I tried to run more I would quickly run out of memory.

[Sparky]

In regards to how many host OS's you can run, it really depends what applications you want to run.

Heavy weight apps like UAE (CPU intensive) might not be a good idea .. also graphics output won't be to swift either ... so a dedicated system would be better.
Where as webservers and smaller database applications wouldn't be a problem for a VMWare environment.

VMWare also makes for a very nice disaster recovery setup, you have your real servers on one site doing all the day to day work and then have a mirror copy of that at another site but using VMWare hosts rather than duplicating the pjysical hardware .. saves money and would allow a business to keep running (maybe a bit slower) until the primary site is back up again.

VMWare is also used a lot for testing work, once you've created you test host you can duplicate it very easily so that when you stuff things up, just click the revert button and a few seconds later you are back in the running.

Regards

[gizz72]

@sparky
You're right about the UAE. It is CPU/memory/hd intensive. And you're right about the mirroring VM's, although it is slow, can imagine that. As long as the main system doesn't give up.
@all
Which leads to another question. What if a scenario ever happens when the main system fails while mirroring VM's, Is it still possible to recover from a major crash(example). Would That 'mirror' still can run under such condition,take over or would also halt in the process? Such of which a cascading effect would occur possibly?

[Sparky]

Regarding mirroring :

Hmmm ... can you explain what you mean ? Are you talking about doing a stretched cluster where one real host is in one data centre and the other is an OS hosted on a VMWare machine in another datacentre ? In which case it would be up the OS's being clustered to sort themselves out.

Or do you mean about mirroring the data ?
Or making a backup image of a virtual host on the VMWare machine ? (in which case just copy and paste the files to another directory .. job done)

Regards

[gizz72]

@Sparky
I mean mirroring where one real and the other running under VM as data center, whereby the 'real' one fails.

Likewise, you've answered the question, just cut and paste. Thanks. :-)