VMware opens up Workstation 7.1 beta Server and desktop virtualization giant VMware has opened up beta testing on its latest desktop hypervisor, Workstation 7.1. Workstation 7 was announced last October in the wake of Microsoft's Windows 7 blitz. Workstation 7 was based on a variant of the VMware hypervisor, and it can carve up a desktop PC, laptop, or …
Why limit the memory/disks to a feasible amount even nowadays - seems like a built in obsolescence which will only annoy people looking to run very large instances while providing no benefit. Even the high flavours of Windows 7 support 192GB memory now, so why not make the limit so far in excess of this that it would take a few generations of hardware to reach.
A significant reason why we list an explicit limit for things like memory and disk size is because they reflect configurations that we actually set up and tested. Often bugs are shaken out during real world testing of such configurations rather than simply eyeballing the code and declaring that it will work.
and last I looked there where not many Desktop Systems with more than 32GB RAM. Same for 2TB Diskimages, first you need a HDD bigger then that to host them.
With typical 4 socket, i.e. 16 cores at the moment, 24 to 48 pretty soon, you are hard pressed to find one supporting more than 192GB RAM, and when you have one of those chances are you have virtualized storage as well and it doesn't make any sense to grow a diskimage bigger than what is needed to host the applications installed on the VM.
Come to think of 4 Socket Servers, you'll probably run ESX on them anyway.
Why limit? Well, at the very least because the overhead of the extra address space would reduce performance for most people who wouldn't need it. Quite honestly, If you need more than 32 GB of RAM in a DESKTOP you probably aren't in the market for virtualized machines, and if you need more than 2TB of disk in a single partition then you should be looking at a SAN before being concerned about whether your desktop virtualization platform could handle it internally.
"and last I looked there where not many Desktop Systems with more than 32GB RAM. Same for 2TB Diskimages, first you need a HDD bigger then that to host them."
No, you need a *volume* bigger than 2TB, such as any of my NASes here at home, or the internal RAID in the server, or...
Paris with glasses, cause she's probably shortsighted too...
The RAID in the server can be considered the same.
Imagine two or three VMs fighting for HD head movements over SMB, it's possible but not very useful. One solution is iSCSI with HBAs with a TCP Offload Engine and bundled 1GB Ethernet channels, or even 10GB Ethernet.
If you can put your files on a file server, you won't need VMs with terrabytes of virtual diskspace.
First of all, my NASes support iscsi. And they have teamed 2Gbit. And ESX VMs work fine, no reason why Workstation VMs wouldn't
Secondly, who are anyone else to say what I or anyone else need or not. At work I routinely check in and out production VMs from ESX to troubleshoot in Workstation. So far I haven't needed to do it with a gigantic volume, but that could change in the future. Etc, etc.
And no, my 4TB hardware internal RAID runs rings around any 2TB physical disk, so it's not the same thing as some crappy SMB nas.
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