back to article Reg readers get physical with virtual machines

Panic no doubt set in for many of you when all of our Virtualization e-Symposium ads disappeared from the site. You'd grown accustomed to the twinkling plugs for our VMware and Intel sponsored show. Well, everyone can rest easy now that the full e-Symposium has been archived. That's right. Those of you looking to expand your …

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  1. Joshua Sugarman

    VMWare isn't everything

    There has been a LOT of hype about VMWare on the register, but interestingly VMWare is a MUCH WORSE solution to Virtual Servers, DR, HA and other solutions requiring virtual machines....

    VMWare provisions hardware for a VPS right? OS virtualisation (i.e Virtuozzo from SWSoft) can allow for 100000 VPS's on one machine (though not best advised).

    The OS are just 0kb links to the hose operating system and the RAM is the host's RAM meaning server requirements are majorly reduced and you have a much increased server density all round solution!

    I don't personally understand why VMware has such a grip on the market? That's my opinion personally though I suppose....

  2. Jim
    Alert

    Re: VMWare isn't everything

    Now correct me if I'm wrong but you appear to misunderstand what VMware (and others) provide. Virtuozzo is a platform for providing virtual OSs, primarily aimed at the webhosting market. VMware provides a platform for running completely seperate (actual) OSs on the same hardware, simultaneously. Not really the same thing.

  3. Joshua Sugarman

    @Jim

    You're half correct. Its not really the same thing, but you do misunderstand Virtuozzo.

    Take a standard enterprise network. Most servers such as DC's, Exchange, Web Server (Mission Critical Stuff) is hosted on Server 2003... With VMWare you must install 4 VMWare boxes seperately on one machine. This means if you have 4gigs of RAM, you must give each box less than 1GB so not to max it out.

    With Virtuozzo you can set virtual hard limits but as the resources aren't provisioned and as the OS files are used for the HD space, you have greater server density also increasing HA.

    However, a VE inside Virtuozzo IS ITS OWN MACHINE... You can do what you like to the files inside of it, and if you change the system files, it will create a new real file instead of a virtual pointer to the HOST file inside the VE. Thus the end user has a Server 2003 box and has NO evidence it is virtualised.

    VMWare has tried going into this market, but to be honest its higher cost, reduced performance. VMWare is the best at a quick one test machine do what you like, but for your mission critical servers, why waste resources? Why not consolidate, use OS Virtualisation, use your hardware and still have exactly the same performance....

    So no Virtuozzo isn't PRIMARILY aimed at webhosting. But that is one of it's uses. There are many others inc servers inside a corporate network, and even virtual desktops with a connection broker I imagine...

    Based on the information above, I am utterly confused why VMWare gets the ultra hype?

  4. Tim

    Recent improvements?

    Has VMWare improved much in the last couple of years? In 05 I worked on a VMWare project for about 6 months & the most remarkable aspect was the project's exclusion list, e.g. servers that couldn't be virtualised because they were the wrong type, had too much traffic, ran at too high CPU, iirc there were about 20 valid exclusion criteria.

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