What are people's opinions on the VM solution du jour?

I've played around with VMware server at home since it became free and I've always been pretty happy with it. I've now got a project to do at work which is going to require building a test system running a couple of instances of XP and a couple Ubuntu JEOS's, so I downloaded a copy of v2.0. Now I've never really liked the web management interface simply because it always seemed so damn flakey, but now v2 uses that exclusively, it's so retarded and it's made me doubt my decision. I'd like to give ESXi a try now it's free too, but sadly I don't have a whole machine going spare just to try it on, nor do I have an iSCSI target for the disc space (I don't think you can actually use the on-board storage).

While googling for some answers to a few VMware problems I've noticed a lot of people extolling the virtues of Virtual Box. I've downloaded a copy for OSX and am currently trying an install of xubuntu on it. Pretty good so far, it seems much quicker than the instance that runs in my copy of Parallels.

What are you guys using? Should I stick with VMware server 2 and sweat out the frustration? Should I go back to version 1? Should I give Virtual Box a proper try?

We're all about VMWare here and we love it. Server, Workstation, and ESX. We're quite happy. We're a windows shop though, so your mileage may vary.

Yeah, you can. You can also use NFS mounts.

Also, VMWare claims that you can use VMWare Infrastructure Client 2.5 to connect to VMWare Server 2.0

Are you running Server 2.0?

The big IT guys run a pretty big Infrastructure 3 installation and they're pretty happy with it. But they have thrown a rather large sum of money at it.

I haven't done side-by-side comparison, but I have tried various versions VMWare, Parallels, and VirtualBox on Mac OS X with Windows guests. To me, VirtualBox seemed to be the fastest, with VMWare and Parallels about the same, lagging a bit behind. However, Parallels 4.0 claims to be 50% faster than previous versions, so I'd suggest taking a look at that if you haven't already.

Is the Infrastructure client a freebie?

Aha, found it inside the server tarball. Shame it's Windows only, suppose you can't have everything.

For multiple VMs networking together, I still just use VMware Workstation. On a multi-core machine with lots of RAM, it's simply sweet. And dead easy to set up, with cloned VMs, snapshot trees, and virtual networking/bridges.

Oddly enough, I too was looking at VirtualBox this week. Read all about it, read the user guide cover to cover, etc..

It just looked like too much manual fuss to configure, and lacks cloning (easy to do outside the program, though), and their idea of a snapshot tree is just a linear revert chain. Not at all the same thing.

Stuff like that *matters* when teaming up multiple VMs. Oh yeah, VMware has "teams", too.

Cheers

You could put the management console in one of the XP VMs and RDP into that VM from your Linux desktop, hence avoiding the web interface.

For ESXi you can boot it from a USB flashdrive and utilize local storage assuming it is a recognised disk controller. Check the forums for thread on whiteboxes for details on what people have gotten to work.

Yes, implementing VMWare ESX is expensive between software, servers and shard storage it ain't cheap. But been able to get that NT4 server that Finance refuses to migrate from off the dying hardware make sleeping at night easier.
I was involved in one such project at my last company, the costs from August 2007 are roughly this:
Dual quad core 32GB ram servers @ $11k * 4
ESX Enterprise * 4, plus VirtualCenter, SQL and S&S @ $25
Windows Datacenter license (license any VM for any Windows server OS, break even price point is ~13VMs per server) * 4 @ $20k
NetApp 3020 SAN SATA & FC @ $100k
Additional Cisco switches $14k
Roughly $200k.
Less the 8 months later we added another four servers, $44k.
When I left a few months ago we hand I think 120 Production VMs, with growth capacity for 60 more I'd guess while still allowing for a server or two to be off line.

So a rough cost per VM was about $1400. Yes, you can get a server for less then that, but if you need redundancy power supplies, disk etc the costs start mounting.

ESX can be done cheaper then the above project costing, but again it all depends on what the needs or perceived needs are going to be.

Windows 2008 Hyper-V has improved a lot and is just as good as ESX from what I can see. It's also quite a bit cheaper. Just a thought...

I find it hard to believe that it's cheaper. Ignoring the fact that ESXi is free (as is a standalone version of Hyper-V), I'm sure that Microsoft has some impossible-to-understand licensing scheme for it's for-cost product.

I also find it hard to believe that a product that Microsoft apparently started developing a year or two ago is as robust as VMware, which has been in development for nearly a decade.

Microsoft bought Virtual PC a while back, and Virtual PC was out 2 years before VMWare.

Now in general I have preferred VMWare over Virtual PC, but Microsoft has had more then just "a year or two" worth of experience with VMs.

It is cheaper for our institution- of course we are higher education which Microsoft gives a big discount for- VMware does not. I talked to many folks in industry recently though and they say Hyper-V is cheaper for them as well though. The benchmarks give ESX a very slight edge in speed, but it's not much really. The only feature ESX has that Hyper-V doesn't is USB pass-through and VMotion (which is in beta for Hyper-V).

http://www.vmware.com/partners/academic/
Free licenses are available for academic instruction and research use only
Now running the college production servers is another thing.

VMotion is no small feature, it permits the hot migration of a VM from one host to another, permitting a host to be seamlessly taken off-line for maintenance. It is also the foundation to the ESX features such as Distributed Resource Scheduling - think of balancing the ever shifting workload among all your ESX hosts and you've got the gist, and Distributed Power Management (experimental) - VM workload varies through the day and week, but CPU/servers are most power efficient the closer to 100% they are, so VMotion the workload to as few servers as possible, but still maintain N+1, and put the unneeded servers in standby, repeat in reverse when workload returns.

Pretty sure ESX doesn't do USB pass-through, maybe you are confusing it with VMware Server? With that said the only real need I think that USB is needed for in the server room is for ISV that depend upon it for dongles, and this can be served with ethernet devices like AnywhereUSB.

There are plenty of other differences between Hyper-V and ESX, MS still has a ways to go, but competition is good for the customer and the industry.

Oh to Bitt Bitt, the 'w' is lower case

I forgot about Virtual PC. However, the first version was for the PowerPC Mac, and was not a virtualization product, but an emulator. The first version that ran on an Intel chip was in 2001, and, while I'm inclined to remember that it was a virtualization product (especially since an emulator would have compared poorly to the VMware virtualization products out at the time), I could be wrong.

Oh, and the most important thing about considering Hyper-V: Microsoft technical support.

If anyone is interesting in taking ESXi for a test drive, www.vm-help.com has a nice list of what people have gotten it to install on, including some basic desktops and laptop.

With Hyper-V you can pause a server and move it to another host, a process taking about 30 seconds. Not as good as VMotion but again you are talking another $2000 per host for VMotion anyways.Plus you have to get VirtualCenter to use it another $2000 etc etc.. it gets expensive real quick.

I'm not interested in live migration for this task, but there are free solutions that don't cost anything like $2K

Jon.

Hyper-V's been out all of 6 months? Who would bet the farm on something that new? VMWare had its licensing issues recently, but other than that it's been rock solid in the server space for as long as there's been a server visualization space.

Comparing Hyper-V and Vmware on price is vacuous argument. It doesn't take a degree in business to see that microsoft charging $28 for Hyper-V is selling it below cost to try and kill off VMWare. Of course, while it costs $28, you've got to run it on a windows server, so that's another kilobuck.

Actually the list price for VirtualCenter is $4,995, and you need to add a SQL license and possible an OS license to that as well. Yup not cheap, but VMotion is still worth it for many shops.

It was not usual for us to have 20 to 30 VMs on an ESX host, moving them off was a "right-click, enter, enter, go make coffee" task. Why do I mention this? Well patches are a part of life, be it ESX or Hyper-V, but with Hyper-V at least you get creative reasons.
I have no doubt the MS will improve their Live Migration feature going forward, but at my old place I would not have gotten 30 seconds of down time to move a VM with out lots of approval, the joys of a 24*7.

Probably my biggest beef with MS and virtualization is the FUD and shennagians they played over the past 5 years trying to strangle the virtualization market while developing there own. I know this is a standard MS play, but it still irks me.
MS is not on a par with VMware's ESX, but with the size of their R&D budget it is only a matter of time before they narrow the gap.

In the interest of full disclosure:
I worked at EMC in 2004 when they bought VMware, and therefore had access to NFR ESX licenses and obviously had access to storage.
I left there in mid 2006 to work for a weather data company, think Weather Channel, but more commercial customers.
I left them earlier this year work at the local storage division of one of the big IT vendors. This puts me in contact with VMware, while my cow-orks a few cubes over handle MS & Hyper-V.

I'd rather pay for neither of these solutions and pick a good Open Source one instead Open Source virtualization is pretty good these days - I've got many systems build that way.

Once the open source ones mature to the point where they work as well as Workstation, I'll switch over.

Was looking hard at VirtualBox last week, but it just isn't there yet.

Cheers

I'm probably going to stick with VMware server 2 now. I've got my various VMs to the point where I VNC or SSH into them directly so the web console now gets rarely used. Seems pretty rock solid and certainly zippy enough.

If I was going to do anything more involved then I'd probably go for 2 luke warm Poweredges and run ESXi on them with a 3rd box running OpenFiler. Virtual Box is pretty neat, I may very well move over from Parallels on my MBP but that's as far as I'd take it for now.

I've been using VirtualBox on my main Ubuntu machine for a while now. It does everything I need it to do. Free is always nice. I'm using VMWare at the office for a lot of "servers" which is great but gets pricey. I have considered switching over to VirtualBox.

As always roles change, and I've been provided with a growth opportunity.
I am currently sitting through 3 days of Hyper-V training, and I'd like to apologies to existing users of Hyper-V for any disparaging remarks I made about their virtualization product of choice. Rather, they have my sympathies.

Heh, that was a kind of generic comment of Microsoft sufferer...