Free ESXi or VMWare Server

[pscsuk]

OK, for a start, I'm a Windows techie, so, while I've used Linux a bit, I'm not a expert, so be gentle with me

Previously, I've used VMWare Server a bit. This is because (a) it was free earlier than ESXi, and also I've tended to 'add' another virtual server into an existing configured server for our own use, so it was easier to install VMWare Server onto an existing Windows Server installation, than to reinstall everything from scratch.

However, now, we're getting a new Proliant ML350, with the aim of consolidating 4 old (ie 700MHz P3..) physical servers onto it. As we're getting this 'blank, there are three options I have:

- Windows 2008 with HyperV

- Windows 2008 with VMWare Server

- Free ESXi

I've pretty much dismissed HyperV, so we're left with the choice between VMWare Server and Free ESXi. Budget is an issue for us, so we wouldn't be wanting to be spending thousands of dollars on virtualisation software

VMWare Server has the advantage that I understand it, and things like backups etc are easy because I can just shut down the guest and copy the files to another directory on the host in a couple of minutes, restart the guest, and back those up separately.

ESXi has the advantage that it has higher performance etc, but, from what I've read, ESXi without the costly Virtual Infrastructure + Virtual Center has limited management options, and things like backups seem to be slow/complicated.

From what I've read, ESXi with Virtual Infrastructure is great for multiple hosts, and VMWare Server is good for test and simple things, but the '1 host, multiple production guest' scenario seems to fall between the two scenarios.

Any thoughts would be welcome.

[TiagoAviz]

pscsuk,

You're totally, absolutely right on every line you wrote. I currently killed four physical servers using the VMware converter + VMware server duo.

Now I've installed ESXi on another production server and I liked it. Very much easier to manage than VMware server standalone. I'd say VMware server standalone is cool when you:

1) Don't have additional hardware to put ESXi and import everything into virtual machines inside it

2) When you want to virtualize into an existing server which you can't reinstall/convert

3) When you're starting to learn virtualization

4) You're scared of ESXi (just kidding!)

Now, the slow backup issue is present when you don't work with an external NFS storage on ESXi. You can't export local volumes on ESXi as NFS shares, but you can SCP them out of ESXi enabling the unsupported ssh server, however it is painfully slow (4mb/s)

A situation occured to me a few weeks back. Currently my VMware server runs on a SLES9 server with Novell services. I removed the NSS modules from the underlying SLES9 which runs VMware Server on top of it and the machine hung up completely, so I had to power it off.

Result? My Oracle server that was running virtualized got corrupted and I had to return a Backup.. Didn't like it.

Another situation. We run a helpdesk system on tomcat6 on that SLES9 box too. When the CPU usage goes up in the host OS, all VM's are affected. On ESXi, I can set CPU, memory, disk and network reservation/limits for each VM, such in a way I can equally distribute resources for all VM's, and also avoiding that high CPU usage issues can generate a chaos on the VM's

VMware server is cool, but the problem is the host OS and what it is doing..

So my intent now is to run all VM's on top of ESXi, and generate the backups on a NFS storage outside it.

Hope this helps!

Tiago

[pscsuk]

Thanks for that. It sort of strengthened my feeling that ESXi is the way to go.

However:

" Now, the slow backup

issue is present when you don't work with an external NFS storage on

ESXi. You can't export local volumes on ESXi as NFS shares, but you can

SCP them out of ESXi enabling the unsupported ssh server, however it is

painfully slow (4mb/s)"

doesn't mean much to me. I did say I'm a Windows techie... Now, I know what NFS is, but that's about it. I wouldn't know how to set up NFS shares or anything... (Also, I know what "SSH" is, but "SCP" is new to me).

We're a small company here (5 employees), so we don't have technologies like SANs. We do have a Windows based NAS, but I was hoping not to have to use that, and it's probably not big enough anyway, as well as being quite old, and only 100Mbps, so probably too slow (we don't currently use it, so it's sitting in the rack powered off).

So, does this mean I have to use the SCP thingy?

If I could work out NFS, would the guests run off the NFS shares (ie needing fast disks/network/RAID), or would you just back up to an NFS share, (so they can be slower)? I could probably set up one of the soon-to-be-redundant PCs with a Linux install on it and share the disk from that using NFS (assuming I'm not talking rubbish), but it would be a lot slower than a local disk (but faster than 4Mbps!).

I wasn't planning on backing up VMs as a 'backup' facility, just as a 'disaster recovery' facility - ie If I have a copy of the VM, I could host it on a different PC if the main server breaks. Regular backups will be done with our regular backup software, so we'd probably only backup the "VMs" on a weekly basis (or less frequently), and backup the data on the VMs more frequently. So, if we get blue smoke, we can put a VM copy onto a spare PC, and restore the data from the latest normal backup.

I guess this would mean that slow backup speed of the VM would be less important. It wouldn't be too bad as long as we can automate it some way, and it doesn't require lots of downtime of the VMs.

Paul

(PS sorry for the 'random' thoughts, but I'm trying to get my head round it)