IT managers gathered in New York City earlier this week to get advice from experts on when, why and how to virtualize their server environments. The takeaway from the conference? If you want to run an enterprise-class virtualization platform in production today, stick with VMware.
VMware ‘Miles Ahead’ of Microsoft Virtual Server, Expert Says
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Eugenia Loli
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It seems that Chris Wolf’s criticism of MS Virtual Server’s lack of “bells and whistles” is actually based primarily on perf (ie. SAN access latency, virtual hard drive latency). Personally, I don’t consider perf to be a bell-and-whistle. It’s more fundamental than that. Also, I’d be interested in understanding the practical methodology and tools that Wolf used for measuring latency. He throws around statistics — but what do those statistics mean in practical terms? It’s impossible to evaluate whether VMware is “miles ahead” without that data.
I’ve been using VMWare here to evaluate mostly hybrid configurations of software and use a Windows 2000 VM as my workstation.
Considering that MS didn’t have anything marketable as virtulatization for the good number of years that VMWare had market share, I would say that the title alone is about as accurate as a perfect right angle.
My boss didn’t seem to think VMWare was worth anything until I showed him many proofs of concept installs of Gentoo, SuSE as an Samba/LDAP directory, thin client, etc.
The general idea of the article. I have had more positive experience with VMwares product, it is a better product. MS is still a newcomer in this arena and while they make a acceptable product, it will be take a while for them to reach the overall quality/feature set/fine tuning level that VMware has achieved.
You also have to figure in that MS forced VMware to provide their entry level products for free. I already have dozens of VM’s built. Would I consider switching? Not unless the MS product completely blows VMware out of the water and is free.
Virtual PC is free, however, I wouldn’t poke at it with a stick because you need Windows to run it and it won’t run a multitude of OS’ other than MS-DOS, OS/2 or various Windows versions. They make no mention of Linux in their FAQ which shows you that they really care about what you run as long as it’s Windows.
This by itself is a reason to shy away from it. VMware runs on Linux or Windows, and they have an Intel-based Mac version in testing which will let you run existing VM’s.
So for right now, VMware has the market and currently has my attention. Creating a webfarm wasn’t this easy 5 years ago… =:D
Actually, I suspect Virtual PC will run more OSes than VMWare. The fact that it supports OS/2 shows that it is able to support an OS that uses some fairly sophisticated hardware tricks. VMWare doesn’t currently run OS/2 as far as I know, though they were working on that issues at one point (the OS/2 code never made it past beta).
The fact that VMWare runs on Linux is a huge plus as far as I’m concerned, but I do wish its emulation was more robust. I’d love to juggle Windows and OS/2 VMs under Linux, for example.
Did you ever see who contributed to OS/2?
You also have to figure in that MS forced VMware to provide their entry level products for free.
Really ? How so ?
If i remember correctly, then vmware was first to release a free vmware-player, and vmware server was free before MS virtual server.
of using both VMware and VirtualPC in a development environment for running test Microsoft clients and servers has been that VMware provides much better manageability through it’s configuration of the virtual machines and the excellent networking config, however for actual interaction with the Virtual Machines for a sustained period VirtualPC feels nicer to use. I usually find myself running VPC VMs on the VMware network adapters.