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The title of this post is part of a quote from David Davis’ SearchCIO article titled COMPARISON: Microsoft vs. VMware. David’s article was published back on June 4, and it’s been sitting in my drafts “screaming at me” to comment on here at VM /ETC. Now, with Hyper-V having been released and Microsoft’s marketing machine starting to cloud virtualization reality, I point my readers to David’s arguments as examples of sane and logical analysis of the two products. Here’s the entire quote my title is taken from in the context it was written:

“VMware is obviously the most experienced company when it comes to delivering a virtualisation product. The company has 10 years of virtualisation experience and a huge customer base, including 100% of the Fortune 500 companies and 92% of the Fortune 1000, totaling over 100,000 customers worldwide. VMware also holds 11 virtualisation patents, and in 2007 their revenue hit the $US1.33 billion mark.

This is in comparison to Microsoft which has a new virtualisation product, little enterprise virtualisation experience, and, to date, no Fortune 500 customers who have adopted their enterprise virtualisation product in a production environment. Ask yourself, which of these companies sounds more qualified to deliver your enterprise virtualisation solution?”

David’s article goes on to make excellent comparison points about

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I have already posted about Sun xVM VirtualBox as a great open source alternative to VMware Workstation. ZDNet also wrote a comparison article of VirtualBox and and VMware Server that I reported on here at VM /ETC. I’ve been using VirtualBox as a free virtualization solution (replace VMware Server 1.5) on my notebook since Sun’s version 1.6 was released. So, when Rick Vanover began his series of posts on the SearchServerVirtualization Blog about VirtualBox I was more than interested. This post is a summary of (and links to) Rick’s posts with some of my personal experiences and opinions thrown in.

Networking Features

In my opinion, one of the biggest adjustments between VMware’s products and VirtualBox is having to

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VI3 Enterprise features VMotion, DRS, and HA require identical virtual networking settings on all of your ESX hosts. Unfortunately, VirtualCenter does not apply a central configuration policy or inheritance of settings from the cluster. Maybe a future version of VirtualCenter will evolve to include global configuration abilities? Until such a version is created, each ESX server’s virtual networking settings will continue to be configured individually by most administrators. However, there are some time saving, global configuration options available today. This post summarizes two methods provided by the virtualization community for creating PortGroups simultaneously across multiple ESX hosts.

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Move over Lefthand Networks VSA, xtravirt.com has provided a free alternative for creating a virtual iSCSI SAN. Xtravirt Virtual SAN (XVS) is a virtual machine appliance that runs on two of your ESX hosts’ local VMFS datastores to create a single, synchronized iSCSI SAN. XVS allows the creation of ESX clusters for VI3 Enterprise features without purchasing a physical shared storage solution.

“The Xtravirt Virtual SAN (XVS) appliance for VMware ESX3 Server is a free solution to provide the benefits of shared VMFS storage without the cost of a SAN – this allows the utilisation of otherwise unused local storage in the ESX server to facilitate enterprise level features such as vMotion, DRS and HA normally only available through the use of a shared storage device. All volume data is synchronously replicated between hosts, providing full fail-over capability with data integrity in the event of host, disk or appliance failure.”

XVS is the perfectly priced storage solution for the home ESX test lab, small and mediium businesses, or the small remote branch office.

To download a copy of the virtual appliance and for more about XVS go to xtravirt.com.

updated 5.24.08

Currently XVS is only configurable as a single LUN across paired ESX hosts. A third ESX hosts can use the virtual ip address for it’s SAN, but the additional host(s) would not be using their local storage as part of the synchronized SAN. Future editions will hopefully expand the storage across more than 2 ESX hosts.

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VMware VirtualCenter comes with built in alerting and a handful of alerts preconfigured. Unfortunately, alerting for disk space usage of either the ESX hosts or the virtual machines is not included. Administrators continue to use common physical infrastructure monitoring and reporting applications such as NetIQ and MOM for VMs, or SNMP capable programs like HP Openview or IBM Director for ESX host monitoring. A less complex and less expensive ( cost of installing and configuring agents on each VM OS ) alternative would be to tap into VirtualCenter’s central management ability to monitor, alert, and report on disk space. This post lists a few free solutions that can already use VC2.x or quickly be configured for ESX hosts and therefore save administrators time and money. Hopefully, a future feature of VC2.x will include vital disk space metrics and alerting.

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Did you know you can modify a VI client shortcut so you can enable single sign on to Virtual Center? This is an undocumented feature that many blogs reported on in March, but most credit vinternals.com and the post VirtualCenter 2.5 Passthrough Authentication as the first to report this option.

“At last! VMware have finally added passthrough auth support in VC 2.5, although it is currently classed as experimental. This is something I have been waiting / asking about for quite some time. And even better, it’s on by default! To use it, simply add -passthroughAuth -s vchostname to the end of the shortcut used to launch the VI 2.5 client.

By default it uses the Negotiate SSPI provider, however since they have fully implemented the interface you can change that behaviour to use Kerberos by adding the following within the <vpxd> node in the vpxd.cfg file on the VC server:

<sspiProtocol>Kerberos</sspiProtocol>”

The screenshot of the VI Client shortcut was found at Pass Through Authentication with the VMware VI Client by Diary of a Bad Golfer. Click on it for a larger image.

There is also a VMware Communities thread at How to enable passthrough authentication in VMware VirtualCenter 2.5

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According to the America VMware VIP Partner Newsletter - April 2008 email I just received, ESX 3.5 can be installed on single processor servers. From the email:

“Effective immediately, customers may install VMware ESX and VI licenses on single processor, physical hosts that are included on our Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). This includes servers with two sockets that are populated with a single processor. Each processor may contain up to four cores. Please note that licenses of VMware ESX and VI are still sold in minimum increments of two processors. With this announcement, VMware is clarifying that a two processor license grant may now be split and used on two, single processor, physical hosts.”

More information can also be found

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When I was linking to RTFM Education from my post Combining multiple VMware .lic files is a thing of the past I noticed Mike wrote a quick post about discovering the new LAN based backup features of VCB. I had to get my own copy of the VMware Consolidated Backup Improvements in Version 3.5 .pdf and understand the new LAN-based backup feature. In short, the requirement for a storage area network, and therefore the installation of VCB on a physical server with HBA(s) has been removed. Installing VCB on a Windows 2003 virtual machine is now possible. Maybe not recommended for larger environments, but possible and a achievable design for smaller infrastructures.

The .pdf also reveals that there are several other new features of VCB that were previously restrictions of the older versions.

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RTFM has become a common acronym among IT professionals. An administrator having a good day will tell you it stands for “Read The Fine Manual.” On a bad day the expression can become a little more colorful. The point of bringing it up is that I actually read the ESX Server 3 Installation Guide and was surprised to find out that the VMware FLexlm License Server no longer needs to use a single .lic file. In VC 2.x you can simply place multiple .lic files in the Licensing Server’s directory.

In the ESX 3 Guide mentioned above page 59 starts out:

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I previously posted an email I received that provided a hardware shopping list for building cheap AMD or Intel ESX servers for home testing. There is also a few good recent discussions in the VMware Community Forums that provide more suggestions for compatible ESX hardware.

Cheap ESX Solution (Tests) discussion contains a table of motherboards and officially unsupported but working servers provided by Dave Mishchenko. Read the post for even more systems and parts to build working ESX servers.

ESX 3.5 test lab lists several desktop systems on which forum users have been successful in installing ESX.

Cheap ESX server, onboard SATA - Working !! starts off providing a parts list of a working ESX system, and then continues with tips and tricks to get ESX working.

Of course, all of the discussions as well as my previous post do not cover the cost of anything except the hardware for ESX. You also need to consider how you will build the complete VI3 environment. For example, you can run VC as a VM, and use Openfiler for your shared storage

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It’s good to see other administrators discussing whether or not to P2V domain controllers, and even better to see that others are recommending the same as I did in my recent post Small business P2V migrations. VMware Communities: VMWare esx 3.5& Windows Server 2003 … is a forum discussion where this topic is discussed in detail. What’s great about this discussion is that it goes beyond the P2V strategy and in to whether or not all DCs in your environment should be VMs.

Some highlights from the forum discussion:

“So it is a bad idea to convert dc’s from physical to virtual correct?

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I’m not sure where this originated, but I got this email today from a coworker. It’s a shopping list to build an ESX home lab with compatible hardware for as cheap as possible. There are 2 host designs.

1. a dual core AMD host for $337
2. a quad core Intel host for $695.

The coolest part about this email is it gives you not only the parts but also the links on sites like newegg.com and allstarshop.com. I haven’t verified all the links nor built either of the systems. The few links I checked have been good, but the price has fluctuated slightly - which is expected.

Here’s the email in it’s entirety as I received it. Let me know if anyone knows who created it.

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