ZDNet comparison of VirtualBox and VMware Server 2.0

Posted on May 23rd, 2008 in blogs, feature comparison, virtualbox, vmware server, workstation by Rich

Jason Perlow of blogs.zdnet.com has written a great feature comparison post of the 2 best multi-platform, free virtualization products in my opinion - Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6 and VMware Server 2.0 Beta 2.

Personally, I used to run VMware Server 1.x on my XP notebook until I was tempted to try VMware’s first beta of version 2.0. Although not an officially supported OS for any version of VMware Server, my use of Server on XP was for basic research and test purposes, and I chose the free version over VMware Workstation. Like most, after the switch to 2.0 beta 1 I experienced frustration with the web interface. Now, since I discovered Sun’s xVM VirtualBox 1.6 seamless feature and the ability to run virtual machines created in VMware’s .vmdk format, I have switched. I am extremely happy with VirtualBox, and I even consider it to be a closer open-source replacement for VMware Workstation with features that rival the still in beta version of Workstation 6.5. I also use VirtualBox 1.6 on both 64 bit and 32 bit Ubuntu at home.

Jason’s comparison focuses on using the products in a true virtualization host capacity, and he provides some interesting performance analysis.

What VMware products support which VM OS?

Posted on May 5th, 2008 in esx 3i, esx3.5, microsoft, server 2008, vista, vmware, vmware server by Rich

The VMware Guest Operating System Installation Guide is downloadable as a .pdf or available online. The document’s “About this Book” section summarizes it’s purpose as follows:

“This manual, the Guest Operating System Installation Guide, provides users of VMware® ESX Server, VMware® GSX Server, VMware® Server, VMware® ACE, VMware® Workstation, and VMware FusionTM information about choosing and installing guest operating systems for VMware virtual machines.”

There are sections of installation instructions for every past and present operating system that is supported. What I am posting from this document is a very helpful table that is a quick reference of what VMware products support which VM operating systems. This table has been copied from the online version of the guide.

This table makes it very easy to answer questions like: 

Create guest priorities on VMware Server

Posted on April 18th, 2008 in how to, linux, vmware server by Rich

The free VMware Server does not have the resource pools or shares system like ESX or ESXi. However, you can manually create priorities for your guest VMs to imitate the effects of these features. If you have a Linux host you can use the scheduler to prioritize by PID, or for any host OS, you can modify the .vmx file of each VM to set priority. In effect, both these methods create a “tug of war” design similar to the resource pool design I discussed in my post titled Designing ESX Resource Pools. The details of using both methods are discussed in this post.

Why should I buy Workstation when Server or Player is free?

Posted on February 18th, 2008 in feature comparison, home, vmetc.com, vmware, vmware server, workstation by Rich

I am certainly not the first to talk about the differences between VMware Workstation, VMware Server and VMware Player. However, this topic of conversation continues to come up. “Why should I buy VMware Workstation when I can download Server or Player for free?” There are some key differences between the products that you should understand before you decide which is right for you.

Using VMs for physical server disaster recovery

Posted on February 18th, 2008 in P2V, dr, platespin, replication, vizioncore, vmware server, vranger by Rich

One of the advantages of a virtual infrastructure is the ability to cost effectively replicate your production systems to a secondary disaster recovery environment. Not only can you do this with virtual machines, but there are now several options available to allow physical servers to be replicated to a stand-by VM. This post will briefly cover several products and solutions and provide multiple commercial options and a free alternative.

VMware vs. the competition - does the market finally understand ?

Posted on December 5th, 2007 in news, treesum, vi3, vmware, vmware server by Rich

Like most if us, I watched the VMware stock plummet over the past several weeks, and I am now relieved to see it recovering again. What inspired me to write this post was an article from TheStreet.com - VMware Shakes Off Worries - News & Analysis - Tech Stock Update - VMW - ORCL

“They say VMware, which has a commanding 90% share of the virtualization market, will maintain its edge for specialized software that allows servers to run multiple operating systems because its management software tools are superior to those of their competitors, including Microsoft.”

I’m not a trained financial analyst. I do not even actively trade stocks, but

Free P2V or V2P using Windows Backup

Posted on November 21st, 2007 in P2V, esx, how to, v2p, vmware, vmware server by Rich

If you have the time you can migrate Windows physical servers to virtual machines (P2V) or virtual machines back to physical servers (V2P) with Windows Backup. Use VMware Converter or your P2V tool of choice for faster conversions. VMware Converter Starter Edition is free, but you can’t use ESX as a destination.

Here’s a high level walk through of how it’s done with Windows Backup:

32 bit Linux VMware Server with more than 1 GB of RAM

Posted on October 28th, 2007 in how to, linux, treesum, vmware, vmware server by Rich

I run the free VMware Server on 32 bit Linux at home. I have it installed on PCLinuxOS 2007 - only because it was the distribution that I had loaded at the time. Before I installed VM Server I increased the server’s memory from 1 GB to 2 GB. Up until now I was only running a couple of VMs at a time and never really had any resource contention.

Just recently I decided to build some additional VMs, and to my surprise I noticed that the server was only showing 1 GB ram, and therefore VM Server only had 1 GB ram available for hosting guests. After some research I found the following article:

Linux.com :: Got more than a gig of RAM and 32-bit Linux? Heres how to use it

“Nowadays, many machines are running with 2-4 gigabytes of RAM, and their owners are discovering a problem: When they run 32-bit GNU/Linux distributions, their extra RAM is not being used. Fortunately, correcting the problem is only a matter of installing or building a kernel with a few specific parameters enabled or disabled.

Installing VMware Tools in Fedora 7

Posted on October 26th, 2007 in esx, how to, linux, vmtools, vmware, vmware server by Rich

It’s not as simple as in Windows VMs !

This guide is the combined instructions found from the guides at:

http://www.howtoforge.com/vmware_tools_on_linux

http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/howto/fedora-7-vmware-tools-install.html

I started with a fresh install of Fedora 7. I used the LiveCD and installed it to the VM hard disk. I did not apply the 210 package updates or the security updates. (Who says Linux doesn’t have be patched as often as windows?)

Note: I was unable to get the shared folders or the fast network driver feature to work. I’ve never been able to get these features working properly, but I’ve never really needed them to. The VMtools will load without these features anyways. I assumed that the sections for fixing the vmxnet module would finally make this work, but it did not. I might have done something wrong so I kept those sections in these instructions in case someone else gets it to work.

Increase the size of a virtual machine disk on VMware Server and Workstation

Posted on August 31st, 2007 in gparted, home, how to, vmware server by Rich

If you have a VM running on the free VMware Server or VMware Workstation that is running out of disk space then you can use the command line tool vmware-vdiskmanager to grow the virtual disk. Then use the Gparted LiveCD to grow the existing partition to the new disk size. Here are the steps: