Pedro writes "Citrix announced today that they are giving away their Xen OSS based virtualization platform XenServer with all the goodies included for free. The big highlights are XenMotion, which lets you move VMs from box to box without downtime, and multi server management. The same stuff in VMware land is $5k. They plan to sell new products for XenServer and also the same stuff on Microsoft's virtualization technology called Hyper-V. It will be interesting to see what VMware does. The announcement comes the day before VMware's big user event VMworld."
This is definitely a big deal, and it's pretty good timing too for Citrix. I bet this has got VMWare rushing to re-think some of what's going on tomorrow at VMWorld.
We currently use VMWare's solution, but will be having a serious look at this option as a way of cutting costs.
I'm downloading it now, will be testing it out by tomorrow. I'm looking forward to seeing how performance looks compared to VMware Server, especially on relatively low-powered virtualization hosts. I haven't been all that unhappy with VMware, but the UI in VMware Server 2 is glitchy to say the least.
While you're at it, download ESXi [vmware.com] to be fair. VMware Server is no comparison with the Enterprise products and comparing it against XenServer would be unfair at best.
Now, in counterpoint, you DO have to pay for the advanced features of ESXi that are free in XenServer, but at least you'll have a fair comparison to work with.
That's the kicker isn't it? If the two are even close to even then XenServer just crushed it. Where I work we run ESXi - but they can afford it. It's nice to know if I wanted to do something on my own and I couldn't, that I would have options.
But if your budget is 0, then xenserver is a viable alternative to vmware server.. That it can also compete with esxi while still being free is a big extra point in its favour.
I've been waiting several months (through multiple missed release milestones) for Sun to get a xVM Server [xvmserver.org] general release out. I'm still running a bunch of VPS nodes under VMware Server in the meantime, and I'll probably be in the ground before Sun's product is released.
It's really a shame, considering how much I like xVM VirtualBox.
The licensing key is only temporary. The full shipping version license will not be available till March 25. I have better things to do than try to implement partial-ware.
As I've pointed out before, the reason many organizations use VMWare is because it just works. Their stuff is solid, and it works in mixed environments real well. Unless they've made some major improvements, Xen has the problem of being only good at Linux on Linux. If you run Linux servers, and want Linux guests, it's great. However it is not good at Windows as a guest, and of course can't run on it at all. While I've never used Hyper-V, I'm sure it is the same for Windows.
However VMWare isn't a problem like that. You can run VMWare on Windows or on Linux (or Mac for that matter). On either platform, it'll run pretty much anything as a guest OS and run it well. Linux, Windows, Solaris, etc all work great and they've got native tools for most platforms.
That's really valuable to us. We aren't interested in playing around with what OSes we can and can't run on our virtual servers. We aren't interested in fiddling and tweaking to make shit work. We want to install it and go.
There's also a whole bunch of other tools/features VMWare has that are really slick, but the OS support is a big one. Unless Xen gets good at supporting Windows as a guest, and by good I mean no problems, high speed, native tools, etc, it just doesn't compare. Same deal with Hyper-V. It may be the best thing ever for Windows on Windows, but if it's Linux support isn't equally good, then I don't see it as threatening VMWare.
1) Requires new hardware. VT is only available on newer Intel processors. So if you have an older server, and many people do, it isn't suitable for that purpose. That will become a non-issue eventually but at this time there are still lots of servers that aren't.
2) In my experience with toying with it, it still has problems with Windows like occasional random crashes and such. VMWare seems as solid as if you are running on real hardware, Xen seems to have additional problems.
Again, it comes down to the "It just works," thing. If you have the hardware that can support it and are willing to tool around and maybe deal with problems, ok then. However if you don't want to do that, then VMWare is what you want.
The other thing to think about is actual support... as in picking up a phone and calling someone when something breaks.
Sure, with a good admin that's rarely a problem... but that 1% of the time you actually need it, you're 100% glad you've got it!
I've managed VM farms since ESX 1... now I have a rather nice ESX 3.5 farm I manage. We've recently gone into an head-to-head between Xen and VMware running Xenapp servers. You know what? We're still buying VMware. Make of that what you will.
Personally I find the Xen product interesting, but still fundamentally missing the "mainframe-ish-ness" of VMware, even out of the box. I love the fact that I reboot my VM hosts only when I patch them, and even then I haven't lost a guest since ESX 3.0 (as in, it went down unexpectedly). I also love the fact that it's well-supported with a fantastic range of third-party products that make my job easier. I also love the fact that the one time we actually needed someone on the other end of the phone, I was able to get one of the developer leads of ESX on the phone with only about 15 minutes of troubleshooting with lower support and have him help us sort through the issues (which ended up being a bug, BTW).
When I was trying to do the Xen test, I got no support from Citrix since they wanted to charge me for the call (VMware didn't), and even when I had a problem I told them that it was a serious issue that would impact this head-to-head they told me I needed to give them a credit card number before I could get anyone to even listen to the problem. So much for support.
Disclaimer: I'm a firm believer in using the "best tool for the job", whether it's free software or commercial. The simple fact is that in my job, commercial software often wins out despite the cost because companies want someone to look to when things go wrong and are willing to pay for the privilege.
So, VMWare gives you free support for their paid product but citrix charges you for support on their free product? Boggles the mind.
We are currently doing a similar head-to-head and so far it seems that for the ESX license costs alone we can hire two full-time admins and buy plenty of support from citrix when needed. YMMV.
The problem was probably that he was talking to their support department. If you ask for free support for an evaluation from the *Sales* department you'd probably get more traction. I've never had any problem getting support pre-sales. Of course I work for a 5 trillion dollar company, so YMMV. (p.s. Even though the company I work for is huge, we sometimes have problems getting support post-sales... Again, YMMV)
Oh I agree, YMMV... as will anyone's. It depends on what you want to do with your infrastructure. VMware still excels in the management of virtual machines, managing as an enterprise rather than a discrete set of virtual hosts.
Part of it is also supportability. VMware is supported by third-party vendors as well to a significant degree. As a result, third-party support and tools are incredibly good (I run a few from Veeam) and finding a solution to a particular problem is usually really easy.
That's $5k for each ESX host license, plus $5k for Virtual Center to control it all, plus licensing costs for SQL Server or Oracle for Virtual Center's back end database needs. If they have 30 hosts or more then the licensing costs can be substantial.
VMware Server doesn't begin to compare to XenServer or VMware ESX. Might as well compare it to VirtualBox or QEMU. ESXi is more comparable to XenServer Express, which are both free and are "bare metal" hypervisors. However, XenServer Enterprise is now also free, plus if you already have a support contract for Citrix XenApp, you are now supported for XenServer Enterprise.
VMWare is the only vendor that has never disappointed as far as support goes. If you have one of them gold/platinum (whatever) contracts and you open a high priority issue with them, you WILL get a knowledgeable support person on the other end of the line in less than 10 minutes.
Having problems with a VMWare (or other vendor) cluster is equivalent to having a few racks of physical servers on fire. Knowledgeable, efficient support is the only thing saving your ass.
Yup. I run vmware-server on my linux box (free for personal use). It is the only free solution around that:
1. Doesn't require anything more than a 386 on the host (ie works on 2+year old CPUs). 2. Doesn't require anything special in the guests to make them run (at least minimally). 3. Doesn't need to be attached to a console of some kind to run (ie runs detached in the background).
I'm not aware of any other solutions that meet these criteria. I messed around with VirtualBox, which works fine except that
Actually, you're dead wrong. Xen runs Windows servers very well (2003 R2 and 2008). In fact, I have managed to get a stable and reliable AD configured on Xen VMs, which is far more than I could get while attempting the same thing on VMware. Xen has been much easier to install than ESXi, even when using VMWare-approved servers, and from my small-shop experience, the performance has been better. SQL Server 2005, MOSS 2007, Exchange 2007 - these all run without issue under Xen 5, using Server 2003 R2 or Server
Kind of. Xen is a hypervisor, but it runs a single guest in a more privileged mode ('domain 0') which is used to run device drivers and the management interface. Newer versions[1] decompose this, allowing you to run the management tools in one guest and device drivers in others, and if the hardware has an IOMMU then the guests running drivers are only slightly privileged and can't compromise the system. At present, Linux, NetBSD, and Solaris can all run as domain 0. I seem to remember someone with a sou
A major issue with virtualization in the enterprise is certification by various enterprise software vendors. If your entire platform stack (hardware, Virtualization, OS, etc.) (can you believe we actually have platform stacks now? Geez...) isn't certified, you just give them an excuse to not support you. VMWare has made some solid inroads here, but the last time I saw Xen on the list of certified platforms for something I was integrating was, oh, I'd say never. Not to say such apps don't exist, but they certainly aren't anywhere near what one would call ubiquitous. For many companies, paying the ridiculous price of VMWare is worth it for this reason alone.
Perhaps... but that argument reminds me a lot of the days of networks like Novell and other similar systems like Banyan.
Eventually other apps will become certified on other hosts, and once that door starts creaking open more and more will jump ship. VMWare should be worried, maybe not for the short term, but definitly for the long term.
the goodies OP would have us believe are actually included. From this story [yahoo.com]
In another move to counter VMware's lead, Citrix will offer its XenServer software free starting in April. One or two high-end features from that product, including the high-availability features, will be moved to Citrix Essentials for XenServer, but many of the existing capabilities will be available for no charge, said Citrix CTO Simon Crosby.
Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V and Citrix Essentials for XenServer each will be priced at US$1,500 to $5,000 per server, depending on the features selected, Crosby said.
They want you to use it and depend on it so you buy support and additional product. In my opinion, if you're running an enterprise virtualization platform for critical tasks, you'd be an idiot to do it without a support contract.
So if you need support anyway, how much of a difference is this vs. buying VMware with support?
I'm not buying that they "tend to win" in a head-to-head with VMware. Sorry. The market numbers (and the fact that they're now giving it away) doesn't really support that. To compete, I su
We recently did a re-evaluation of our virtualization tech, and VMware won out over Xen. The simple reason: VMware can run Windows on machines that don't have hardware VT. Sure, if we wanted to immediately replace every single server with a new one containing a new cpu, that'd be different, but in this economy you don't really want to throw away perfectly good hardware that still runs VMware at a very nice speed. Xen requires hardware VT, or you aren't running Windows guests, period. VMware doesn't care; it uses hardware VT if you have it, or it does software virtualization otherwise.
Is it really a saving? VMWare uses binary rewriting on CPUs that don't have AMD-V or VT-x. This imposes anywhere from a 10% speed penalty upwards, depending on how much time your code spends executing privileged instructions. A server CPU that doesn't support HVM will be from early 2006 at the latest, meaning that its raw performance and especially performance-per-watt numbers are going to be huge compared with modern systems. I wouldn't be surprised if you could consolidate at least four of your existing systems onto a single unit if you upgraded, giving significant savings in terms of power and space usage.
Whether you use Xen or VMWare, the TCO comparison between buying new hardware and running on pre-HVM hardware is not so clear cut.
You're describing the practice of using virtualization to host multiple dedicated-purpose "appliances." I use this approach myself; I've got a Debian VPS doing proxy work, another couple of nodes for static HTML serving, another for dynamic apps, one that just serves as an XHTML validation server, etc.
Hardware is cheap these days, and virtualization makes the clean separation of appliances on a single managed box very easy to accomplish. The benefits I get include improved security (difference services run on partitioned hosts) and ease of management (upgrading one application doesn't break others).
How long before we see multiple dedicated-purpose appliances packaged in a single box with the only thing different between multiple models is a license key that 'turns on' the proxy, static web server, router, firewall, e-mail server, etc.
You're describing the practice of using virtualization to host multiple dedicated-purpose "appliances." I use this approach myself; I've got a Debian VPS doing proxy work, another couple of nodes for static HTML serving, another for dynamic apps, one that just serves as an XHTML validation server, etc.
Hardware is cheap these days, and virtualization makes the clean separation of appliances on a single managed box very easy to accomplish.
At one installation I managed, it was decide that the single (Linux) "server-that-did-everything" approach would be scrapped in favor of multiple virtualized appliances.
Without boring everyone with the details, the "experts" brought in to do this left with tail between legs when it was found that the harware previously used, and which never exceeded 2% CPU Utilization, was woefully inadequate to handle the four virtual machines into which it was virtualized.
New hardware was going to be needed. The manager sent the experts packing, and paid his in-house staff overtime to restore the system to its prior state.
Virtualizing an entire operating system to run a single system for the sake of simplicity is still absurdly wasteful of CPU cycles, memory, and disk space.
NO, New hardware is not cheap.
Anyone who believes it is cheap is looking only at the sticker price and not the staff, power, cooling, backup, rack-space, setup-time needed.
To use the cheapness of new hardware as a justification for virtualization is to turn the whole Virtual Machine concept on its head.
At the end of the day you have to ask: Why vitrualize if doing so means you are going to have to buy new hardware? Just buy the new iron and split out your functions across different platforms and take advantage of the redundancy, and reliability of not having all services disappear do to a single component failure.
Because your anecdote can be trumped by another anecdote..
Virtualization CAN save money on hardware, cooling, rack space, etc. You have a single multi purpose server. That means that virtualization may not meet your needs. However, take into account the areas where I work, which include a data center that is thousands of square feet (No, this is not a hosting site for web servers, though I have worked for a hosting facility).
Imagine taking into account environments where you need testing, development, pre production, staging and production. Rather than put them on a single machine (Highly unlikely) you can instead buy a small farm of machines, say 20 boxes for multiple applications/environments and then have them pooled into units and use virtual servers of varying priority and power levels. Your staging should have near production capabilities, your dev box, maybe not. Set the thresholds and hardware differences to your liking. However, if each unit was a physical box, even a 1U you would have a lot more rack space required, perhaps multiple node clusters for each, for availability. In a virtual environment, you are pooling physical machines, so at worst, you are overusing capacity beyond your original spec, but the machines should still be available as much as the OS allows.
Your scenario doesn't have any availability for downtime. In mine, if Physical box 11 needs a firwmware patch, I migrate VMs to the other machines and then take P11 offline. I patch it, and rotate in low priority machines to ensure it works as needed. What do you do when you have to go down to the physical machine to patch firmware/bios? You lose all your applications, right?
Virtualizing has overhead on it's own, plus the overhead of running 4 separate kernels, and 4 seperate copies of all the userland shared libs... Running everything on a single OS image, when correctly configured, gives a pretty significant performance benefit. Virtualization is more heavily used in the windows world, where it is common practice to have a complete install for a single purpose because a lot of apps don't play well together.
Running everything on a single OS image, when correctly configured, gives a pretty significant performance benefit.
And pretty significant maintenance COST. Running everything on a single OS image means you have to:
a) settle on one OS. you cite windows VMs being common because apps often don't play well together. In my experience, Linux really isn't much better... lots of apps are only vender supported or fully compatible with a limited set of distros or distro versions with specific package version requirements, deviate outside that and your on your own...
With VMs you can trivially run product A in RHEL4 and service B in Debian, and simply not have to worry about it.
b) any time you make a change to any of the services on the image, you have to retest and validate the entire image to ensure nothing broke. If I'm running A and B, and an update to A requires me to update perl or python... and B also uses perl or python than you need to potentially extensively re-test B to make sure it still works.
c) when one of the services load grows its trivial to migrate that service to a new physical server without doing a ton of work building a new image, moving data, testing it, spinning the service down on the old server, etc. Granted, running VMs means overhead that will mean you will have to migrate the service earlier than you would otherwise... but the savings in effort when actually moving it more than makes up for it.
I can't speak to what happened in your particular scenario, but yes, staff, power cooling, etc. are big drivers for virtualization. I've seen multiple racks of servers condensed down into two servers and a SAN running in about 20U. You can get to everything remotely (out-of-band) without needing an IP-KVM and can restart hung servers without needing an IP/Serial PDU.
Setup time for new servers is orders of magnitude faster. fill out a couple screens in a click-and-drool GUI and you have a new server up and running.
Redundancy and reliability are also quite a bit better. While you're right a catastrophic failure of physical server hardware will bring down the VMs hosted on that server, they can immediately be powered on again on one of the other physical hosts. (Of course if you use local storage with virtual servers, you're playing with fire and will get burned eventually) Virtualization also makes it reasonable to cluster services for HA since you don't need 100% more hardware for failover. VMotion or XenMotion (which I haven't yet tried) will let you move running VMs off a physical box you suspect of failing or need to service which is damn handy, though I don't know that it's worth the price VMWare charges in most cases.
Virtualization means NOT needing to buy new hardware since the hardware becomes a commodity, run it till it fails and then replace it. You get out of proactive replacement cycles and expensive 7x24x4 support contracts. When you need more capacity, you just add another node and redistribute your VMs rather than having to deal with the headache of migrating an overutilized server to new hardware.
Why not add the service to the existing box? Thats what we ended up doing.
The thing of it is, if you have enough processing power to add Virtualization, you have way more than you need to add the service to the existing box.
I fully understand the big installation guys with a rack full of servers consolidating many into one who have responded here. They are making up for excesses of the past (too much hardware) using the path of least resistance. Instead of learning how to add a service to an existing box they simply clone an existing box into a Virtual Machine, freeing up hardware, some of which is probably obsolete and due for replacement. Its a cost effective approach.
There are also security reasons to do such a thing.
But that's the opposite argument presented by the GP who was talking about the cheap price of hardware as justification to virtualize. That's just wrong on so many levels.
One of the selling points of Unix has always been the ability to have multiple user accounts with security policies that prevent them from interacting badly. The problem, of course, is that security holes are relatively frequent. In particular, local security holes, i.e. exploits in any code that ever runs setuid, are quite frequent. That they're so frequent that people don't trust OS security at all, to the point of running separate apps in separate virtual machines, seems like a pretty conclusive determin
very well, actually. I use to host a slew of paravirtualized debian 'machines', alongside a couple of Windows 'machines'. Xen Server is a nice product - it has good support for Linux and for Windows, and it's fast. I have had trouble setting up a DC under VMWare Server 1.x and 2 when using Linux as the host OS, but no such issues with Xen Server. No clock skew problems, fast networking, easy SAN support, etc.
I had managed to get the tightwads where I work to approve a budget for Xen Server this year (I'm usi
heh (Score:5, Interesting)
I like the marketing for this The enterprise-class features you need at none of the cost. [postclickmarketing.com] I'm thinking this is a pretty big deal.
Re:heh (Score:4, Insightful)
This is definitely a big deal, and it's pretty good timing too for Citrix. I bet this has got VMWare rushing to re-think some of what's going on tomorrow at VMWorld.
We currently use VMWare's solution, but will be having a serious look at this option as a way of cutting costs.
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Re:heh (Score:4, Informative)
While you're at it, download ESXi [vmware.com] to be fair. VMware Server is no comparison with the Enterprise products and comparing it against XenServer would be unfair at best.
Now, in counterpoint, you DO have to pay for the advanced features of ESXi that are free in XenServer, but at least you'll have a fair comparison to work with.
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That's the kicker isn't it? If the two are even close to even then XenServer just crushed it. Where I work we run ESXi - but they can afford it. It's nice to know if I wanted to do something on my own and I couldn't, that I would have options.
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But if your budget is 0, then xenserver is a viable alternative to vmware server..
That it can also compete with esxi while still being free is a big extra point in its favour.
In comparison... (Score:2)
It's really a shame, considering how much I like xVM VirtualBox.
Main XenServer site. (Score:5, Informative)
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Here's the link: Get it while it's hot. [citrix.com]
Why did I read this as Get it while it's hot. [grits]? The I, T, R, and the X making an S sound?
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Re:Main XenServer site. (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm guessing VMWare isn't that worried (Score:5, Informative)
As I've pointed out before, the reason many organizations use VMWare is because it just works. Their stuff is solid, and it works in mixed environments real well. Unless they've made some major improvements, Xen has the problem of being only good at Linux on Linux. If you run Linux servers, and want Linux guests, it's great. However it is not good at Windows as a guest, and of course can't run on it at all. While I've never used Hyper-V, I'm sure it is the same for Windows.
However VMWare isn't a problem like that. You can run VMWare on Windows or on Linux (or Mac for that matter). On either platform, it'll run pretty much anything as a guest OS and run it well. Linux, Windows, Solaris, etc all work great and they've got native tools for most platforms.
That's really valuable to us. We aren't interested in playing around with what OSes we can and can't run on our virtual servers. We aren't interested in fiddling and tweaking to make shit work. We want to install it and go.
There's also a whole bunch of other tools/features VMWare has that are really slick, but the OS support is a big one. Unless Xen gets good at supporting Windows as a guest, and by good I mean no problems, high speed, native tools, etc, it just doesn't compare. Same deal with Hyper-V. It may be the best thing ever for Windows on Windows, but if it's Linux support isn't equally good, then I don't see it as threatening VMWare.
Re:I'm guessing VMWare isn't that worried (Score:5, Insightful)
VT changed the game. Nowadays Xen (and others like Sun's VirtualBox) runs Windows just fine.
It's sad to notice that both VMWare and Citrix are neglecting building non-Windows management clients by the way :(
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Hmm...
Ask [yellow-bricks.com] and ye shall receive [vmware.com]
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(sigh)
Amazing what 15 seconds of Google finds [windowsitpro.com], isn't it?
Two problems with that (Score:5, Informative)
1) Requires new hardware. VT is only available on newer Intel processors. So if you have an older server, and many people do, it isn't suitable for that purpose. That will become a non-issue eventually but at this time there are still lots of servers that aren't.
2) In my experience with toying with it, it still has problems with Windows like occasional random crashes and such. VMWare seems as solid as if you are running on real hardware, Xen seems to have additional problems.
Again, it comes down to the "It just works," thing. If you have the hardware that can support it and are willing to tool around and maybe deal with problems, ok then. However if you don't want to do that, then VMWare is what you want.
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Re:I'm guessing VMWare isn't that worried (Score:5, Interesting)
The other thing to think about is actual support... as in picking up a phone and calling someone when something breaks.
Sure, with a good admin that's rarely a problem... but that 1% of the time you actually need it, you're 100% glad you've got it!
I've managed VM farms since ESX 1... now I have a rather nice ESX 3.5 farm I manage. We've recently gone into an head-to-head between Xen and VMware running Xenapp servers. You know what? We're still buying VMware. Make of that what you will.
Personally I find the Xen product interesting, but still fundamentally missing the "mainframe-ish-ness" of VMware, even out of the box. I love the fact that I reboot my VM hosts only when I patch them, and even then I haven't lost a guest since ESX 3.0 (as in, it went down unexpectedly). I also love the fact that it's well-supported with a fantastic range of third-party products that make my job easier. I also love the fact that the one time we actually needed someone on the other end of the phone, I was able to get one of the developer leads of ESX on the phone with only about 15 minutes of troubleshooting with lower support and have him help us sort through the issues (which ended up being a bug, BTW).
When I was trying to do the Xen test, I got no support from Citrix since they wanted to charge me for the call (VMware didn't), and even when I had a problem I told them that it was a serious issue that would impact this head-to-head they told me I needed to give them a credit card number before I could get anyone to even listen to the problem. So much for support.
Disclaimer: I'm a firm believer in using the "best tool for the job", whether it's free software or commercial. The simple fact is that in my job, commercial software often wins out despite the cost because companies want someone to look to when things go wrong and are willing to pay for the privilege.
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Re:I'm guessing VMWare isn't that worried (Score:5, Interesting)
So, VMWare gives you free support for their paid product but citrix charges you for support on their free product? Boggles the mind.
We are currently doing a similar head-to-head and so far it seems that for the ESX license costs alone we can hire two full-time admins and buy plenty of support from citrix when needed. YMMV.
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Oh I agree, YMMV... as will anyone's. It depends on what you want to do with your infrastructure. VMware still excels in the management of virtual machines, managing as an enterprise rather than a discrete set of virtual hosts.
Part of it is also supportability. VMware is supported by third-party vendors as well to a significant degree. As a result, third-party support and tools are incredibly good (I run a few from Veeam) and finding a solution to a particular problem is usually really easy.
I would advise e
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That's $5k for each ESX host license, plus $5k for Virtual Center to control it all, plus licensing costs for SQL Server or Oracle for Virtual Center's back end database needs. If they have 30 hosts or more then the licensing costs can be substantial.
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Yup. I run vmware-server on my linux box (free for personal use). It is the only free solution around that:
1. Doesn't require anything more than a 386 on the host (ie works on 2+year old CPUs).
2. Doesn't require anything special in the guests to make them run (at least minimally).
3. Doesn't need to be attached to a console of some kind to run (ie runs detached in the background).
I'm not aware of any other solutions that meet these criteria. I messed around with VirtualBox, which works fine except that
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It may be the best thing ever for Windows on Windows
Steve Balmer and Bill Gates check into a hotel...
*boom-chicka-chicka-bow-wow-boom-chicka-chicka*
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> You can run VMWare on Windows or on Linux (or Mac for that matter).
And bigger installations run Vmware on Bare metal.
And that's where it REALLY shines.
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SQL Server 2005, MOSS 2007, Exchange 2007 - these all run without issue under Xen 5, using Server 2003 R2 or Server
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Kind of. Xen is a hypervisor, but it runs a single guest in a more privileged mode ('domain 0') which is used to run device drivers and the management interface. Newer versions[1] decompose this, allowing you to run the management tools in one guest and device drivers in others, and if the hardware has an IOMMU then the guests running drivers are only slightly privileged and can't compromise the system. At present, Linux, NetBSD, and Solaris can all run as domain 0. I seem to remember someone with a sou
Certification games (Score:4, Interesting)
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Perhaps... but that argument reminds me a lot of the days of networks like Novell and other similar systems like Banyan.
Eventually other apps will become certified on other hosts, and once that door starts creaking open more and more will jump ship. VMWare should be worried, maybe not for the short term, but definitly for the long term.
Not quite all.... (Score:4, Informative)
In another move to counter VMware's lead, Citrix will offer its XenServer software free starting in April. One or two high-end features from that product, including the high-availability features, will be moved to Citrix Essentials for XenServer, but many of the existing capabilities will be available for no charge, said Citrix CTO Simon Crosby. Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V and Citrix Essentials for XenServer each will be priced at US$1,500 to $5,000 per server, depending on the features selected, Crosby said.
So . . . (Score:2)
They want you to use it and depend on it so you buy support and additional product. In my opinion, if you're running an enterprise virtualization platform for critical tasks, you'd be an idiot to do it without a support contract.
So if you need support anyway, how much of a difference is this vs. buying VMware with support?
I'm not buying that they "tend to win" in a head-to-head with VMware. Sorry. The market numbers (and the fact that they're now giving it away) doesn't really support that. To compete, I su
Still no Windows without hardware VT (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Still no Windows without hardware VT (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it really a saving? VMWare uses binary rewriting on CPUs that don't have AMD-V or VT-x. This imposes anywhere from a 10% speed penalty upwards, depending on how much time your code spends executing privileged instructions. A server CPU that doesn't support HVM will be from early 2006 at the latest, meaning that its raw performance and especially performance-per-watt numbers are going to be huge compared with modern systems. I wouldn't be surprised if you could consolidate at least four of your existing systems onto a single unit if you upgraded, giving significant savings in terms of power and space usage.
Whether you use Xen or VMWare, the TCO comparison between buying new hardware and running on pre-HVM hardware is not so clear cut.
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Re:Is Virtualization the New OS? (Score:5, Informative)
Hardware is cheap these days, and virtualization makes the clean separation of appliances on a single managed box very easy to accomplish. The benefits I get include improved security (difference services run on partitioned hosts) and ease of management (upgrading one application doesn't break others).
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How long before we see multiple dedicated-purpose appliances packaged in a single box with the only thing different between multiple models is a license key that 'turns on' the proxy, static web server, router, firewall, e-mail server, etc.
Re:Is Virtualization the New OS? (Score:4, Insightful)
PBX's have been doing that for a long time now with systems that support Voice Mail, VOIP clients, multi site grouping and routing.
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Re:Is Virtualization the New OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're describing the practice of using virtualization to host multiple dedicated-purpose "appliances." I use this approach myself; I've got a Debian VPS doing proxy work, another couple of nodes for static HTML serving, another for dynamic apps, one that just serves as an XHTML validation server, etc.
Hardware is cheap these days, and virtualization makes the clean separation of appliances on a single managed box very easy to accomplish.
At one installation I managed, it was decide that the single (Linux) "server-that-did-everything" approach would be scrapped in favor of multiple virtualized appliances.
Without boring everyone with the details, the "experts" brought in to do this left with tail between legs when it was found that the harware previously used, and which never exceeded 2% CPU Utilization, was woefully inadequate to handle the four virtual machines into which it was virtualized.
New hardware was going to be needed. The manager sent the experts packing, and paid his in-house staff overtime to restore the system to its prior state.
Virtualizing an entire operating system to run a single system for the sake of simplicity is still absurdly wasteful of CPU cycles, memory, and disk space.
NO, New hardware is not cheap.
Anyone who believes it is cheap is looking only at the sticker price and not the staff, power, cooling, backup, rack-space, setup-time needed.
To use the cheapness of new hardware as a justification for virtualization is to turn the whole Virtual Machine concept on its head.
At the end of the day you have to ask: Why vitrualize if doing so means you are going to have to buy new hardware? Just buy the new iron and split out your functions across different platforms and take advantage of the redundancy, and reliability of not having all services disappear do to a single component failure.
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Re:Is Virtualization the New OS? (Score:5, Informative)
Virtualization CAN save money on hardware, cooling, rack space, etc. You have a single multi purpose server. That means that virtualization may not meet your needs. However, take into account the areas where I work, which include a data center that is thousands of square feet (No, this is not a hosting site for web servers, though I have worked for a hosting facility).
Imagine taking into account environments where you need testing, development, pre production, staging and production. Rather than put them on a single machine (Highly unlikely) you can instead buy a small farm of machines, say 20 boxes for multiple applications/environments and then have them pooled into units and use virtual servers of varying priority and power levels. Your staging should have near production capabilities, your dev box, maybe not. Set the thresholds and hardware differences to your liking. However, if each unit was a physical box, even a 1U you would have a lot more rack space required, perhaps multiple node clusters for each, for availability. In a virtual environment, you are pooling physical machines, so at worst, you are overusing capacity beyond your original spec, but the machines should still be available as much as the OS allows.
Your scenario doesn't have any availability for downtime. In mine, if Physical box 11 needs a firwmware patch, I migrate VMs to the other machines and then take P11 offline. I patch it, and rotate in low priority machines to ensure it works as needed. What do you do when you have to go down to the physical machine to patch firmware/bios? You lose all your applications, right?
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Re:Is Virtualization the New OS? (Score:5, Informative)
Virtualizing has overhead on it's own, plus the overhead of running 4 separate kernels, and 4 seperate copies of all the userland shared libs...
Running everything on a single OS image, when correctly configured, gives a pretty significant performance benefit.
Virtualization is more heavily used in the windows world, where it is common practice to have a complete install for a single purpose because a lot of apps don't play well together.
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Re:Is Virtualization the New OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Running everything on a single OS image, when correctly configured, gives a pretty significant performance benefit.
And pretty significant maintenance COST. Running everything on a single OS image means you have to:
a) settle on one OS. you cite windows VMs being common because apps often don't play well together. In my experience, Linux really isn't much better... lots of apps are only vender supported or fully compatible with a limited set of distros or distro versions with specific package version requirements, deviate outside that and your on your own...
With VMs you can trivially run product A in RHEL4 and service B in Debian, and simply not have to worry about it.
b) any time you make a change to any of the services on the image, you have to retest and validate the entire image to ensure nothing broke. If I'm running A and B, and an update to A requires me to update perl or python... and B also uses perl or python than you need to potentially extensively re-test B to make sure it still works.
c) when one of the services load grows its trivial to migrate that service to a new physical server without doing a ton of work building a new image, moving data, testing it, spinning the service down on the old server, etc. Granted, running VMs means overhead that will mean you will have to migrate the service earlier than you would otherwise... but the savings in effort when actually moving it more than makes up for it.
In my experience. of course. YMMV.
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Re:Is Virtualization the New OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't speak to what happened in your particular scenario, but yes, staff, power cooling, etc. are big drivers for virtualization. I've seen multiple racks of servers condensed down into two servers and a SAN running in about 20U. You can get to everything remotely (out-of-band) without needing an IP-KVM and can restart hung servers without needing an IP/Serial PDU.
Setup time for new servers is orders of magnitude faster. fill out a couple screens in a click-and-drool GUI and you have a new server up and running.
Redundancy and reliability are also quite a bit better. While you're right a catastrophic failure of physical server hardware will bring down the VMs hosted on that server, they can immediately be powered on again on one of the other physical hosts. (Of course if you use local storage with virtual servers, you're playing with fire and will get burned eventually) Virtualization also makes it reasonable to cluster services for HA since you don't need 100% more hardware for failover. VMotion or XenMotion (which I haven't yet tried) will let you move running VMs off a physical box you suspect of failing or need to service which is damn handy, though I don't know that it's worth the price VMWare charges in most cases.
Virtualization means NOT needing to buy new hardware since the hardware becomes a commodity, run it till it fails and then replace it. You get out of proactive replacement cycles and expensive 7x24x4 support contracts. When you need more capacity, you just add another node and redistribute your VMs rather than having to deal with the headache of migrating an overutilized server to new hardware.
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Re:Is Virtualization the New OS? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not add the service to the existing box? Thats what we ended up doing.
The thing of it is, if you have enough processing power to add Virtualization, you have way more than you need to add the service to the existing box.
I fully understand the big installation guys with a rack full of servers consolidating many into one who have responded here. They are making up for excesses of the past (too much hardware) using the path of least resistance. Instead of learning how to add a service to an existing box they simply clone an existing box into a Virtual Machine, freeing up hardware, some of which is probably obsolete and due for replacement. Its a cost effective approach.
There are also security reasons to do such a thing.
But that's the opposite argument presented by the GP who was talking about the cheap price of hardware as justification to virtualize. That's just wrong on so many levels.
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the security part is sort of an indictment of OSs (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the selling points of Unix has always been the ability to have multiple user accounts with security policies that prevent them from interacting badly. The problem, of course, is that security holes are relatively frequent. In particular, local security holes, i.e. exploits in any code that ever runs setuid, are quite frequent. That they're so frequent that people don't trust OS security at all, to the point of running separate apps in separate virtual machines, seems like a pretty conclusive determin
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Xen Server is a nice product - it has good support for Linux and for Windows, and it's fast. I have had trouble setting up a DC under VMWare Server 1.x and 2 when using Linux as the host OS, but no such issues with Xen Server. No clock skew problems, fast networking, easy SAN support, etc.
I had managed to get the tightwads where I work to approve a budget for Xen Server this year (I'm usi
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Based on the vmware/xen comparison chart, there is no limitation...
http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/feature.asp?contentID=1686939 [citrix.com] (this link was posted above by someone else as well, I do not claim credit)
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This was never true; I'm not sure where you heard it.