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  Asked: Feb 18 2008   6:35 PM GMT
  Asked by: Windows System

Which virtualization product is the best?


Virtualization, Xen, VMware

Hi, anybody has any idea which virtualization product is the best?

VMware.
Xen.

I am still confiusing with each one, anybody has experience in one of them.

Do recomend us to wait until Microsoft Windows 2008 birth.

Many thanks.

Eyad.

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Last Answered: Mar 5 2008  10:01 PM GMT  by Blithespirit


Latest Contributors: Jlees, Mrdenny


I am a huge fan of VMWare for server virtualization. They have an excellent management tool, and the platform is rock solid. It's also get a very light weight OS under it which frees up more resources to the virtual machines than if you run Windows as the base OS (as you do with Virtual Server).

At a prior company we have a large VMWare infrastructure setup with 4 machines for production and about 90 servers running on them. At my current company we are currently only using VMware for development, but will be rolling VMware to host production servers later in the year. We have a single server with another on the way. We have 53 virtual servers running on that one physical piece of equipment.

VMWare offers a free version of VMWare, called [VMWare Server, that isn't as lightweight (or robust) as VMWare ESX that could get you started in a test environemnt. Download it and give it a try!



VMware is the market leader at present and on most fronts the forerunner of trends, Virtuozzo is great and has big pluses if you..


A. only use one type of operating system,
B. need big I/O
C. have limited space and no shared storage.

Virtuozzo uses containers to semi snapshot your host, so basically the host system is themain system and your first VM is a container with just the changed files on, so your VM could be only 40 meg, it uses host resources so superfast non hypervisor.

they all have their place and downside is Virtuozzo onoy allows one type of host but again is host based and good on space, also cheaper budget. free downlaod for this too fro mthe parrallels website.

VMware server is good and free and so is Virtuozzo although not free, you do get what you pay for but costs nothing to check out.

I have done installations of both for varying customers and its horses for courses and both work

is only my opinion but hope it helps


Paul
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Buddyfarr  |   Feb 18 2008  9:06PM GMT

I too am a big fan of vmware. we do not have a very large installation but it has run flawlessly. the only caveat that I have heard is that vmware won’t run different OS’s on the same machine, (as in linux and windows, etc). I don’t know if this is true and would have to look into it. Virtuozzo will do this because they have a different way of virtualizing. They virtualize the OS instead of the hardware and claim to be able to run more virtual machines on the same server than vmware. We have yet to test it though so I cannot contest this claim.

 

Esiebert7625  |   Feb 21 2008  7:53PM GMT

VMware is the current market leader with the best features and a very stable platform. Because of this it is also the most expensive virtualization platform to deploy. So if cost is an issue then you might look at the other lower cost/free products. You do get what you pay for however and VMware has recently introduced some lower cost SMB bundles to try and make there VI3 product more affordable for smaller shops. Also you might check out some of these comparison links below…

VMware ESX vs. Microsoft Virtual Server - <a href="http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=303426" rel="nofollow">http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=303426</a> and <a href="http://communities.vmware.com/thread/101408" rel="nofollow">http://communities.vmware.com/thread/101408</a>
Bake Off: 4 Virtualization Suites in One Review - <a href="http://www.crn.com/software/201400070?pgno=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.crn.com/software/201400070?pgno=1</a>
Compare VMware ESX and XenEnterprise 3.0 - <a href="http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=569978&tstart=0" rel="nofollow">http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=569978&tstart=0</a>
The little Xengine that could - <a href="http://servervirtualization.blogs.techtarget.com/2007/11/19/the-little-xengine-that-could/" rel="nofollow">http://servervirtualization.blogs.techtarget.com/2007/11/19/the-little-xengine-that-could/</a>
A brief architecture overview of VMware ESX, Xen and MS Viridian - <a href="http://it20.info/blogs/main/archive/2007/06/17/25.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://it20.info/blogs/main/archive/2007/06/17/25.aspx</a>

 

Jlees  |   Mar 4 2008  8:41PM GMT

VMWare is by far the best available. We had 10 servers running VMware with about 50 systems running on them– with tons of room for growth at a previous company. The company I work at now has 3 servers with 40 systems running on them– not so much room for growth.

Your milage will vary with teh application you run on them, but in general you can easily get 2-3 VM’s per processor without noticing much (if any) performance impact. ESX is definately the cadilac but VMware Server is free and I worked at a third company that used it in production for lightweight applications.

Microsoft also bough (err.. makes) a VM product, but it is IMHO only comparable to VMWare Server, and my experience tells me it doesn’t preform as well as VMWare Server.

However Microsoft is getting better at it. It will be interesting to see the new HyperV features in Windows 2008 in action.