While the benefits of virtual machines on a workstation may be quite straightforward, there are more far-reaching ramifications for virtual machines on a server. Micrososft’s Virtual Server 2005 integrates with Microsoft’s management & third-party tools, while VMware’s Virtual Server GSX has its own virtual infrastructure management software called VirtualCentre and can also integrate with third-party tools.
Virtual servers: VMware vs Microsoft
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
We almost finished the integration of our VMware ESX farm and I must admit that I am very impressed. We have 6 physical host running around 30 virtual host and it’s not over yet. Before, we has around 90 windows servers (NT4, 2000, 2003) and now… around 50 and plan to go as low as 25. Being in a development shop, the need to keep our environement in case our production goes wrong is critical, and most of theses old server are mostly not used at all. Having those 6 hosts plugged into your SAN makes it very easy to swap a virtual host to another physical with VMotion… and it is working very well. I can’t say that virtualization is for every need, but in our case, it was exactly what we needed.
And now my dream, VMware for Solaris… That would be so nice!
Enjoy!
Microsoft Wins!
I doubt I could convince my boss that we should spend $6000 on GSX server when I can get VS2005 for nothing from MSDN.
Besides which migrating all my VS2005 VMs to VMware would be a headache.
Of course, if you already started with VS2005 and it is ok with you, stay with it. I was not trying to push VMware, just trying to explain how good it was for us.
Ciao!
MS currently is hands down better than VMWare for price (but not features). I had a look at VMWare, they wanted about $3000-$5000 US depending on model and number of processors which is pretty much more than the hardware in most cases. (Unless you go quad-Opteron or something extremely high end).
I’d be interested in seeing how VMWare competes with VS2005 once it starts ramping up. VS2005 may not have all the features of VMWare, however it comes pretty close and is more than adequate for what we require here. I’d like to use VMWare, but the pricing is simply outrageously expensive. If it was capped at a ratio of the server hardware or something reasonable (ie, sub-$1000) I’d probably use it instead of VS2005. I think a lot of the features VMWare has will probably be subsumed by MS in perhaps 1.5 or 2.0 of VS2005?
I can’t praise VMware enough which is more than I can say about Microsoft’s Virtual PC (I take it that VS2005 is based on the former). In a shootout, I’d go with VMware hands down.
what about http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/index.html ?
works pretty well for me ….
You should have a look at the Linux VServer ( http://www.linux-vserver.org/ ). It doesn’t use virtualization but context ( like the BSD jail tool). So you don’t have any noticeable performance difference between a virtual server and a fully dedicated physical server.
We have 5 Debian Woody vservers (PHP + Mysql) running on a PIII 666Mhz with RAM 512M and only half of the physical memory is actually used…
Of course you wouldn’t use that MSDN copy of MS Virtual Server for production work, would you? That would violate the license you agreed to stating that MSDN software would only be used for development work. BTW, from VMWare’s site, GSX server for 2 processor system is $2500, $5000 for 4 processors.
I am a VMware ESX user in production/qa/integration/test environments. We have roughly 50 VM’s spread across 6 servers and have had nothing but success. We will be ramping up consolidation of underutilized physical servers next year with a target of 200 VM’s.
I cannot see how any rational IT professional could choose to use VS2005. What do you do when you need to patch the bloated and security-hole-ridden Windows OS? Just take down all 10 (15, 20, whatever) VMs on a weekly basis just to patch. What about the exposure to viruses? How do you respond to your customers – “Oh, sorry your performance sucks today on these 20 (virtual) servers. VS2005 was comprimised and was actively participating in a global virus originated DOS on microsoft.com. Please call back tomorrow.”?
The beauty of ESX is it runs a relatively sparse, relatively hardened OS that does not carry the overhead of a monolithic OS like Windows Server.