VMware Releases Server 1.0

epit writes "VMware has released v1.0 of their VMware Server product for free (as in beer) as planned. Up until now, it had been a beta download. You can download your copy via the VMware website. Release notes are also available."

Free download... sweet!

I've never used VMware but have heard lots of great things from many people. I always wondered what the business model was for VMWare. Who uses it? Why would they pay for it? Things like that.

Are there any legit home uses for VMware on a regular basis?

Re:Free download... sweet!

As someone that develops, it is an amazing tool. Right now I want to test load balancing for my web application to ensure everything works correctly. I can setup a load balancing cluster, install it all, then throw requests at it all on my PC. It allows me to purchase no new hardware, no new software, and ensure that I am getting the results I desire.

While it doesn't allow me to stress test, it does allow me to test other aspects.

Plus i can install every OS/Browser combination I need and I only need to worry about diskspace. Plus, once you create the images, you never have to reinstall the OS, you just clone it. Awesome piece of software.

Re:Free download... sweet!

Our corporation has been using VMWare Server ESX for the past 2 years and it is great. Instead of having 5 servers in a rack, you can buy 1 beefy server and just have everything in a VM. But lets say your servers are mission critical and you are worried about a hardware failure on that 1 server. If you use VMotion you can have redundant servers, so if your main VMWare server box fails, the 2nd backup VMWare server automatically picks up where the other left off, you dont even notice that the virtual machine switched servers - it works that good. Seriously, VMWare is awesome.

Re:Free download... sweet!

If you have an application that is not memory or cpu intensive, but it doesn't work well with others - this works very well. Even if it does work well with others, it helps you to really put it by itself. This is partly useful for troubleshooting, but it means when you call a company for support they can't really point their fingers at anyone else because their product is the only thing installed.

It is also useful for things like clustered file servers. They don't take up much cpu/memory, but if you put two (or more) of them out there on a VM box you can roll them back and forth for patches, updates, adding drives, etc.

It also helps for disaster recovery. You can do the equivalent of a bare metal restore in a few minutes versus loading a machine from scratch, loading drivers, loading your backup software and then restoring.

So multiple answers - and I'm sure there are many more that I haven't listed.

Re:Free download... sweet!

"Searching for pr0n and warez in a virtual machine and whack it when I'm done."

Thanks for sharing that.

Re:Free download... sweet!

"Why would you need more than one server on a big beefy server instead of running everything on one server?"

Good grief, where do I start?

Putting everything on one big server is a recipe for disaster. What if one app goes down and you need to take it down, reboot, rebuild, whatever? You have to take your whole bloody network down. Lots of angry users.

What if you upgrade your apache server which inadvertantly causes your mysql server to die? What do you do. Restore the whole shooting match from backups? Spend an hour or two trying to roll everything back? All while your users are looking over your shoulder asking "how long before it's fixed?"

Doing it that way is just shitfight city.

On the other hand, if you run all your servers virtually you open up a whole world of possibilities.

For example, a few years back I worked at a place that ran their whole operation on a bunch of NT4 servers made up of a pair of Compaq Proliant ML530's (which supported SMP but only had single 1Ghz P3s fitted). These servers also had 1Gb RAM each plus 3 x 18Gb SCSI in raid 5 configuration. On top of that they had a hodge podge of whitebox servers, all with SMP mobos but only single CPUs. It was a nightmare.

One day the backup tape drive died and the bosses were not keen to spend 3 grand for a new one. Also, I already had the shits with the whole shitfight so I built a few tempory boxes, moved the stuff onto them and pulled the 2 compaqs offline. I cannibalised one of them and made a monster (well it was back then) server with dual P3's, 2Gb RAM, 6 disk hardware raid and redundant PSU's. I kept the remaining chassis as a spare in case the main box died.

I stuck redhat 9 on the "monster" and GSX server on that. Then I built 8 virtual servers, 2 x Win2K AS and 6 x redhat 9 and ran all of the main apps (apache, sendmail, PDC, BDC, FIle+print, MySQl and a CRM package all on seperate virtual servers. Once this was done I switched off all the other boxes and after running like that for a few weeks to make sure all was OK I also scrapped those boxes. Again I cannibalised them and came up with a lesser monster whitebox which I also put vmware GSX on, stuck 1gbit lan cards in both and hooked the two up with a link cable, wrote some scripts to backup the servers across that link nightly.

So, I had rationalised the entire server room down to two boxes, considerably improved reliability and all for the price of a vmware license and on top of that I had a spare chassis available in case of a catastrophic failure.

About a year later one of the SCSI discs died. The whole thing kept working but it was sloooow. So, all I did was manually copy over the server images from the nightly backup, shutdown the main server and turn on the primary lan interface of the backup box. The whole shebang was back up and running within an hour with no loss of data. Neato.

Other advantages for vmware are;

If you want to do major upgrade to a server, you can just copy the server image to your development box, fire it up, do the upgrade and then test it all out. All perfectly safely. If you fuck it up then you just do it again and try to figure out what went wrong, document your steps and when it is time to do the live upgrade you simply do a manual backup and then do the upgrade. It should work OK because you have already tested and documented your process and even if it doesn't it is a simple job to just restart the old server from the backup you made and start again.

If you want to do something like a major overhaul of something like a webserver with a mysql backend then you will love vmware. You just leave your old server running and build up the new one over how many days/weeks/months you like. You can fully test it in a sandbox network (another great feature of vmware, "host only" networks) and once you are satisfied that all is well you just copy it over to the main box, shutdown the old virtual server, start up the new one and you're done. If there is a problem down the track you ju

Re:Free download... sweet!

Very true. If you have anything that is cluster aware though this will work. This isn't really a function of VM of course, but what is cool about doing this on VM machines is you have multiple levels of redundancy. You can VMotion the inactive server, swap the cluster and then vmotion the active server - and doing it this way you can move machines from one piece of hardware to another with no downtime.

Again this isn't really a VM thing but if you have a whole VM farm on a SAN - you can swap out whole servers without impacting running processes. We mainly use this for file servers / DNS / AD / print servers , but if your servers are beefy I don't see why you couldn't do this with any cluster aware application.

Re:Free download... sweet!

> The popularity of VM solutions is a damning indictment of the OS environment, scheduling and multi user memory protection capabilitie of Windows.

Just have to get your digs in on Windows, don't you? So what about those people that like to virtualize Linux? Does Linux automatically suck too?

Or just maybe there's reasons that go beyond stability.

Re:Free download... sweet!

The problem comes with multiple apps that have different dependencies. For instance take installations of php4, php5, apache1, apache2, phpBB, mediawiki, coppermine, subversion and trac, all using mysql and postgresql. Each one has plugins. Each one has potential security vulnerabilities.

I've been in the situation where one of the above required updating to fix a security hole, effectively breaking the rest. For instance, one needed to be using mysql5 but the others didn't support it.

Now they can all live on their own separate Vmware machines and can be updated separately.

--jeffk++

Browsing in a sandbox to escape spyware

Check out Virtual Appliances [vmware.com]. Basically, there are people who've already fully configured environments in a virtual machine so you can just pick up the free (as in beer) VMWare Player product and run them.

Why would you want to do that? I use a virtual machine to browse the Web - that way, my computer doesn't get bogged down by spyware (only the virtual machine does) and it's much more painless to simply purge a spyware-ridden virtual machine and start afresh than it is for your main computer.

Re:Browsing in a sandbox to escape spyware

2 GB USB Drive - $40
VMWare Player [vmware.com] for Linux & Windows - $0
A good Linux distro [vmware.com] - $0 (yes, you may flame away)
Google Browser Sync [google.com] - $0
Blowing away anything that somehow made it onto your system - $priceless

-Tash
Vrooommm... [tashcorp.net]

Re:Browsing in a sandbox to escape spyware

Also, VMWare's support -- I'm told -- for FireWire is limited and/or not present, and USB 2.0 also is pretty poor. I don't know if that means you can't run a VM off of a mounted volume that originates on a Firewire/USB 2.0 device, or that the guest OS just can't "see" the FireWire bus, but you might want to be careful before designing something around VMWare and FireWire or USB 2.0.

Evaluating Wikis using VMware virtual machines

Exactly - the TWiki project, which I'm involved in, has created a VM that enables a Windows user to download a complete, working TWiki system to evaluate for use as an enterprise Wiki for group collaboration. This radically simplifies installation for people who used to take many hours to install on Windows (primarily the issue was getting Cygwin, Apache, Perl and RCS installed properly) - the VM is actually a Debian GNU/Linux system but that's pretty much invisible to the person installing the VM. The result is that after a hefty download you can have a working Wiki within 5 to 10 minutes, most of which is waiting for Linux to boot in the VM.

See this page [twiki.org] for more information and download links.

Re:Free download... sweet!

I recently left a position where we were using ESX server to host mail (Lotus Notes under Linux) for around 10k users along with Notes application servers, and other Linux and Windows utility servers.

ESX was great because it allows for much more efficient use of Server hardware. In a lot of cases we had applications running on seperate servers because the apps were unstable. Without VMWare that means seperate hardware (usually racks filled with shelves and desktop PCs if the company is cheap, or 1U servers if they're not) and all the administrative overhead of dealing with those servers. We had 30-40 VMs running inside 12 physical servers including heavily used primary and failover mail servers.

Running inside a VM gives you advantages if you're running a lights out data center, or if your servers are at a remote location. Many has been the time where a server hung and I needed someone on-site to power cycle it - with VMWare you can power cycle the VMs from anywhere, and I've never seen ESX take a dive (supposedly there's a purple screen of death, but I've never seen it)

Another advantage is backup/disaster recover planning. With a VM, your whole server is just a couple files. You can copy those files to a remote location via a variety of means, and boom, you have an off-site clone of your server. More importantly the VMs are hardware independent - you can have a datacenter filled with Dell 6850s burn to the ground and when you power up your VMs in a colo facility running HPs, the VMs don't care about there being different RAID cards, or NICs with the wrong MAC addresses.

This post was made on a Dell D620 running ubuntu with VMWare workstation on top hosting a windows VM for when I need to do windows stuff :)

Re:Free download... sweet!

We use it here in the Child, Youth, and Family Development department in New Mexico. We have an IBM BladeCenter where the blades run VMware ESX with Virtual Center, and most VMs run SuSE Linux. We are transitioning from HPUX and AIX to an all Linux backend. We like that combo because it makes it easy to clone and move machines as need be. When a server becomes overloaded, we can buy another blade and move some VMs over onto it with ease.

Virtual PC

I wonder if there is any concidence between this and Virtual PC 04/07 being released free. Hrmm...

Re:Virtual PC

If you are not aware of it (I wasn't until earlier today) Microsoft is now putting Virtual PC 04 and 07 [still in beta] out for free. Virtual PC Website [microsoft.com]

Re:Virtual PC

There is some correlation in an overall strategy, and there may be something more than coincidence to the timing of the releases. Microsoft is eager to make its presence known, especially in selling Virtual Server. Virtualization addiction on the desktop leads to virtualization addiction on the server (not that this is a bad thing). Microsoft is more interested in selling Virtual Server, so they make Virtual PC available for free to get their foot in a door on which VMWare Workstation is leaning heavily.

On a similar vein, knowing that Microsoft has a strong incentive and ability to get Virtual Server known and used, VMWare decided a few months ago to differentiate VMWare GSX from ESX (their enterprise server product), and to make it free as an enticement to play with server-level virtualization so they could upsell to enterprise-level virtualization.

Both companies made certain products free in an attempt to upsell to their respective primary product lines. Microsoft loses little for giving away Virtual PC because they have so little of the market as it stands. VMWare loses little for giving away Server because it made up a small portion of its own sales. Microsoft possibly gains sales of Virtual Server, while VMWare possibly gains sales of ESX.

I for one...

welcome our new virtualized overlords and their free gifts.

(Sorry, it had to be said.)

Ah, but...

With VMWare, you can have more than one overlord in the same body at the same time!

Where will this end?

This anyone find this concept of Mac on Intels, virtual platforms, and emulation makes them physically sick? I feel like I'm looking into a pair of mirrors, staring into infinity. Yes, that's it I'm giving up computers. Goodbye everyone.

With this out, why would I need vmplayer?

With this, apparently I can create new machines, make snapshots and suspend machines to disk. Doesn't making this a free download make vmplayer redundant?

Re:With this out, why would I need vmplayer?

I think VMware realise that there are a lot of free virtualisation products out there, and so they had a choice of entering the free market or slowly dying out - something like Novell, Corel, Netscape etc.

Once we all get used to virtualisation, then the big companies that will start using this and see the benefits will buy the big, expensive ESX Server product.. and the support, and the tools and add-ons. For the rest of us, we get free toys so everyone's happy.

Xen is a different product, its a virtualisation tool, but it allows you to split 1 OS into several running 'instances'. VMWare is a 'wrapper' that allows you to run several different OSes side by side. Which one you'd go for depends on your requirements.

Re:With this out, why would I need vmplayer?

Xen doesn't split "1 OS into several running 'instances'" (which is what Solaris's containers or Linux's VServer or FreeBSD's jails do). Xen vitalizes all OSes that are run (except the Dom0 OS is allowed to tell the hypervisor what to do) which is very similar to how VMware ESX server works. Xen also provides many of the same features that the VMware product family provides (like live migration).

Very cool!

I love VMWare and am stoked about this as it will allow for use of virtualization where ESX would have been too expensive (GSX was always too expensive :) )

I've thought a great idea along with this would be a super light linux distro to run as the host OS (an almost ESX server - obviously ESX has performance advantages since the kernel is running directly without an intervening OS layer)

What's the license agreement?

I went to download server beta a few days ago to try it, and AFTER filling in my contact details I got the licence terms that said no commercial use under any circumstances. This was a shame since I wanted to run a couple of windows-ony apps under Linux on my work laptop to save dual-booting.

Have they changed those conditions? I still don't see terms before filling out the contact info, and don't feel like filling them in again only to feel cheated again.

Re:What's the license agreement?

I went to download server beta a few days ago to try it, and AFTER filling in my contact details I got the licence terms that said no commercial use under any circumstances.

This is total BS. Their license agreement has never said that, and as a matter of fact, their FAQ [vmware.com] makes it pretty clear:

Q: Who can use VMware Server?

A: The benefits of server virtualization can be realized by a company of any size -- even small companies with just a few servers.

This comes at a good time

Today I diched Windows from my laptop and was right in the process of installing Kubuntu. Unfortunately there are a few Windows apps I still need and that have postponed my use of Linux on the desktop for a long time although I've been using it on servers for quite a while. I keep hearing of those emulator/virtualizers/whatnots but can't really figure out what is the difference between them: VMware, Win4Lin, Crossover, Wine... Do you install Windows after or before Linux ? How do you install Windows apps ? Etc... Is there a comparision of them somewhere (I've searched in the past) ?

Re:This comes at a good time

Those are seperate systems. There are virtualization applications (VMware, VirtualPC) which run as applications and will emulate an entire computer as the program so you can install a fresh OS on top of it and run it in its own little happy sandbox. There are also programs such as wine, crossover, etc, which emulate windows from inside *nix, so they give you the nessecery dll files and hooks to be able to run Windows binaries on unix-based systems. So if you wanted to play Everquest/Wow/Civ4 from your Linux box you would use Wine. If you wanted to run a Linux server for testing from your Windows box you would use VMware.

Re:This comes at a good time

You install Linux first. Then you install VMware (Server). Then you create virtual machines with reckless abandon, and install Windows into one of them. From there, you can install any Windows application on the Windows virtual machine.

Be aware that you need a legitimate license/key to install/activate Windows XP; after a P2V (physical-to-virtual) conversion of a WinXP box, I had to make the obligatory call to Microsoft and promise that I didn't have -that-version- of XP installed on any other system.

Otherwise, I'd suggest just downloading VMware Server, and playing with it for a while. The first time you see the POST (power-on self test) and BIOS screens of the VM it's like you've stepped into another dimension; your mind reels at the possibilities. Tiny servers for all sorts of DNS/LDAP/SAMBA bits. Honeypots. Network IDS. Cookieless web browsing. Knoppix instances for whatever you can think of. It's endless.

Nuggets: The virtual machine shares (by default) the CD drive of the host; but you can point to an .ISO file instead. You can point the drive to a REMOTE drive, of someone who's connected in through the virtual console, so they (the remote end) can have the CD they need to install from in their hands, instead of in the host's CD drive. Same with floppies. The network bits are similar; a private net, a NAT'ed net, or a bridged net. Whatever you need.

Just install it. Let the possibilities wash over you.

\harv
--
How does this sig thing work?

The business uses of VMware are obvious...

and have been stated elsewhere in this thread.

What seems to be missing is good reasons for using a VM at home. I can think of several:

1) Seems a lot easier than dual-booting (for those of us with SO's who aren't comfortable with Linux)

2) Makes a good home lab for what is rapidly becoming another standard tool of the IT trade

3) Hardware speeds are approaching the level where (except for gaming and certain compute-intensive applications) most home machines are quite powerful enough to run multiple partitions without the user even noticing a slowdown.

4) Shiney!

5) Free (as in beer)!

Feel free to add to this list - it's a long way from being complete.

Incidentally, I wonder if Windows Vista will run under VM? I'm guessing yes (as anything else would mean that Microsoft is cutting their own throat).

Re:The business uses of VMware are obvious...

Honestly, I think you missed the most important use:

6) Lock your significant other/children into a sand box. When they inevitably screw windows up, roll back to a previous working version.

Bryan

So many problems, though

I love this software, but the Linux client really is neglected. The documentation for Linux is not really there. There is no decent configuration tool for Linux. There are many bugs. For example, if you do any port forwarding, you must edit some nat.conf file. And if you reconfigure anything after that with vmware-config.pl, it completely wipes out all your changes to nat.conf without warning. I spent so much time dealing with these types of bugs while testing the beta, I should have simply purchased another solution.

Some questions

If I install Vmware with a linux host and a windows guest, can I have Skype 2.0 running on it, accessing my mic and my webcam? (I know I should use Ekiga instead, but...)

And would my wireless pcmcia card, that is not recognised by linux, be working under this artificial windows? Can I use the usual windows drivers with the guest vmware windows?

VMware Server, Workstation, GSX, etc.

So, I know VMware Player is a gimped version of Workstation. Where does VMware Server fall in line here? Their website lists it under a semi-separate product category ("For 1st-time Users"), but what functionality does this not have that Workstation does?

Re:VMware Server, Workstation, GSX, etc.

VMWare Server is a server so the VMs running on it are accessible from other machines by running a client tool. With Workstation and Player you can only access and use the VMs from the machine they are running on - no remote connectivity (unless you run a client connectivity tool like VNC fom within the VM). Workstation is more sophisticated (mutiple snapshot capablitities, VM Teams, etc) with the exception that the VMs cannot be accessed remotely.

Why it is being released for Free

In case you haven't been following Xen, the reason why you cannot run Windows is because we are waiting for intel's VM processor instructions to be implemented in the next VT release of thier processors.

Well, that appearently is no longer a problem and you should be able to use a standard Linux Fedora Core, or whatever installation to load windows on by next year.

VMware knows this, and is trying to prevent existing customers from leaving or looking elsewhere by giving away its products.

Interesting thoughts I have was:

1) I can install Windows workstations and servers remotely.
2) How long will it take for Microsoft to add a Service Pack update that detects windows running on a Linux box and have it start not working properly so that people use thier VM product instead, or don't have a choice.
3) Whats the performance going to be like.

VMWare is a nice product but A it is too expensive, and be it is too expensive because it turns any VM machine into a basket case performance wise.

So XeN's approach hopefully won't be any worse, maybe better since they are not trying to emulate an entire machine. :-)

-Hack

Nice to play with, but way to slow.

I am working on a new VoIP startup and looking at virtualization. I looked at VMware, but the preformance sucked big time. Xen may not have the nice management interface (yet), but the approach gives far far better preformance. I just don't see why you would be willing to pay a 20 - 40% hit using VMware vs Xen.

-Nathan

Oh Damn

Goddamnit, I just finished testing and upgraded my servers to Beta 3 yesterday.

I have to say though, as the IT manager in a medium sized business with a limited (whose isn't?) IT budget, VMware has made my life MUCH easier.

I can buy capable dual-core servers for $500, use VMware to host several platforms on each and have budget leftover for spare hardware. I can offer more services to users, because I don't need to purchase additional hardware or request a budget increase. Security is improved, because VMware lets me separate services which should not be running on the same platform. And reliability is improved and downtime is reduced. If hardware fails, I can restore the virtual machines from backups onto spare hardware already running VMware. With the static nature of most of my servers, logs and databases are on an NFS, I can usually restore full functionality within an hour.

And you know what the best part is? I don't have to sweet talk the CFO for more money when budget time comes around again. And strangely enough, the higher ups see the better bang for the buck and my budget is increasing.

So this does what now?

So I downloaded this VMware server, filled in a bunch of bogus info to get a serial number and now have ubuntu installing in a window on my desktop...

Should I have used the workstation version? And why does it think not having VMWare tools installed is a bad thing? Looking around their site I can't find alot of basic infomation for the lost /.er who is just playing around to gain some geek points.