Comments on: VMware vs. Xen vs. Microsoft

By: Jim Owens

Jim Owens — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:15:16 +0000

VMware unfortuately has the worst support ever. You spend a lot for it, and basically they’ll try to draw it out until you either resolve your own problem, or you just get fed up and reinstall. The VMotion option is just there so that you can move your VM off the server and reinstall ESX.

Recently I tried QEMU under Linux, and would really rather push my clients to try alternative options for Virtualization.

By: bryan

bryan — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 04:46:27 +0000

Walid, I think what they are referring to is having all the network servers running as virtual machines, on either one or more servers.

By: Walid Shaari

Walid Shaari — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 17:40:40 +0000

Hi,
I would like to know more about what you mean by virtual infrastructure, would that include monitoring the virtual machines, and knowing exactly their resource demands, keeping accounts, load balancing them, and providing health checks within the virtual infrastructure, as i am not sure that these are already available in vmware yet? are they?

Walid

By: Alex Weeks

Alex Weeks — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 04:17:38 +0000

Here’s some related blog posts:

http://www.vi411.org/2006/09/19/virtually-unstoppable.html

http://www.vi411.org/2006/09/21/virtually-unstopable-part-2.html

By: Irfan

Irfan — Tue, 23 May 2006 18:18:06 +0000

Thanks for posting your experience and your solution for the problem (your May 20, 2006 post).

lonesysadmin: “We were having horrible I/O performance, and the solution for it…”

Just wondering which application you were getting bad performance for on the CLARiiON. It’d be nice if you could detail the workload and whether it was a synthetic or real application. Feel free to contact me offline as well.

I’ve read your May 20, 2006 posting for the details of the solution from Bala Ganeshan’s VMworld talk but you didn’t talk about your workload. Take care,

Irfan

By: justice

justice — Wed, 17 May 2006 05:46:05 +0000

“We were having horrible I/O performance, and the solution for it, after lots of back & forth with VMware support, ended up being found by me in a pair of slides from VMworld.”

I am also seeing I/O problems… What was your problem, and how did you resolve it?

By: lonesysadmin

lonesysadmin — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 23:02:19 +0000

Not by itself, no. I think the potential for people to really do some dumb stuff is high with virtualization. Especially when it comes to overcommitting resources.

Lots of VMs also expose infrastructure problems. Virtualization is all about hardware consolidation, but not about OS image consolidation. Suddenly you have hundreds of new virtual machines, because it’s easy to create them, and now you have to worry about managing them, licensing, etc.

As always, the technology isn’t a solution, it’s just different set of problems.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 22:55:40 +0000

I think what with Server and Player being free from here on in that’s pretty much the strategy going forward. You’ll see Microsoft shove their hypervisior into Windows, the Linux crew are doing that today with Xen, and VMware are opening up different parts of their technology and file formats.

Creating and running VMs is a neat trick, but it’s not a long term business strategy.