[NTLUG:Discuss] Lastest on Virtualization - Xen, VMWare or Microsoft - which to choose

[Robert Parkhurst]

What is this for exactly?

I've used Xen, VMware and VirtualBox (somewhat)...

We looked into a VM solution for servers a year or so ago and looked at Xen
and VMware.  VMware is really good but is expensive..  With VMware though
you can do lots of really cool things like doing fail-over and all of that,
but you need the money for the hardware and for licensing of VMware.  It's
got USB 2 passthrough as well so you can pass devices like external DVD
burners, Blackberries, etc.

Xen was cheaper and was more friendly towards lower-end hardware (i.e.
non-Intel Gigabit NIC's, non-SAS/SCSI RAIDs, etc.) but anything less than
their "enterprise" package meant you could only run Windows VM's (which
irritated me a bit).  I don't remember a lot of tech specs on it...I do
remember though being "irritated" that it was a Linux solution, that ran on
Linux, but unless you paid them for the "enterprise" edition you only got to
run Windows VM's.

VirtualBox is nice and 2.x series offers some good stuff..  What I didn't
like about it (on the Linux side at least) was that it didn't automatically
make bridging devices so VM's can't easily just connect to each other.
VirtualBox has the least amount of functions, I think, right now for the
server level--it doesn't have HA and whatnot, but for the workstation I
really liked it.  It seemed to have less memory overhead than any of the
deskside VMware products.

There's also the free VMware Server (now at version 2)...It doesn't have all
the features of the paid-for version (obviously), but it's pretty good..
Version 2 offers USB 2 passthrough (1.x did not) and you can run multiple
VM's and everything.  I've used it to host my Windows 2003 "workstation"
instance on my Ubuntu 8.04 Linux box doing mostly Blackberry syncing and
application uploading.


For the server, if you have the money, I'd prefer to have the paid-for
version of VMware because it's memory overhead is very low as it runs on a
striped down version of RedHat Enterprise and you've got features like HA
failover between VMware nodes and such.  The downside is that the management
tool runs on Windows...but you can always "fix" that with RDesktop...




Hope that helps!



Robert




On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 2:16 PM, Lee Doran <LDoran at goccs.com> wrote:

> So the hot topic of last part of this year - what VM solution to choose,
> who has the best feature set, whats the best priced, and so on.
>
>
>
> What is this groups feelings about the Various Virtualization options
> out there?
>
>
>
> Lee
>
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