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As usual, Alessandro Perilli is the first to report something VMware related. This time it's details regarding the upcoming VMware ESX Server 3.5 release, as well as some interesting news regarding the new 3i product.

VMware Infrastructure 3.5 and ESX Server 3i to be available since December 2007 with new prices and editions has the details.

Interesting to note that 3i will be aggressively priced at $500 and that it will support SATA drives, which makes it a perfect entry level product for the SMB marked just getting into virtualization.

Another good move is the ability to manage VMware Server 2.0 installs from the new Virtual Infrastructure client. All in all good stuff, and it's evident that VMware is gearing up now after the IPO, the Citrix acquisition of XenSource and the upcoming threat from Microsoft.


Interesting times for all us virtualization nuts!

Rod Paddock over at codebetter.com (and blog.dashpoint.com) has published a blog entry called "Server Virtualization the New Snake Oil" where he claims that server virtualization, specifically naming VMware, is a bad idea. Well, after reading the entry I tend to agree.

Not that I think that server virtualization is a bad idea, but the implementation Rod outlines is indeed a very bad idea. Running eight 24x7 production servers on a single piece of hardware, without building any redundancy is indeed a very bad idea. In fact, thats a recipe for disaster. The original post does not indicate whether VMware Server or VMware ESX server were used.

Like anything else, especially in the tech world, building solutions without the proper knowhow or competence will lead to problems at some point. If you build the infrastructure right, there is no reason why a virtualized environment would be more error prone than a physical one. As long as you are dealing with production servers, you do need to build redundancy into the infrastructure, regardless of virtualization or not.

Server Virtualization is not snake oil, not even close. In my experience, from my own live production environment, server virtualization (with VMware ESX Server/Virtual Infrastructure 3) has resulted in better uptime for our servers, reduced power consumption and better manageability.

I guess Rick's comment on the original post sums it up pretty nicely:

The only proper reply to this badly informed rant is: virtualization does not compensate for incompetence.

One of my virtual machines, running on ESX Server 3 (VI3) was in dire need to get it's boot partition expanded. Obviously I had miscalculated the storage requirements for this particular VM, but luckily there is an easy way to expand the VMDK file and then use third party tools to let Windows utilize the new space.

• 1. Shut down the Virtual Machine
• 2. Expanding the VMDK
  Log into the ESX server via ssh (I prefer Putty) Find the .vmdk file you want to expand and use vmkfstools to expand it:
  vmkfstools -X 20g vmname.vmdk That expands the existing virtual disk to 20 Gigabytes, now we need to make the extra space available to Windows.
• 3. Resize boot partition
  As Windows doesn't allow you to resize the active boot partition, you'll need a third party tool to accomplish this step. In this case I used the GParted LiveCD, but you could also use BartPE or other bootable disk partition/resize tools.
  All I did was to download the GParted ISO, copy the .ISO to my datastore, mount it as a Virtual CD-ROM device and boot my VM from it. Then use the tool of choice to expand the existing partition.
• 4. Remove the virtual CD-ROM device and reboot the VM

Thats it. How painful would that have been if this was a physical machine?

Alex Barrett over at searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com has posted an article comparing Microsoft Virtual Server to VMware ESX server. As John Troyer at VMware correctly points out, thats comparing apples to oranges.

The correct comparison would be to compare Microsoft Virtual Server with VMware Server, not ESX server.

One thing they both fail to mention though, and that is IO performance. Running IO intensive servers, like Domino/Exchange in a virtualization layer on top of Windows Server 2003, be it VMware Server or Microsoft Virtual Server limits you to the underlying OS IO limitations. Running several of these virtual machines on top of Server 2003 will cause serious slowdown of the virtual machines purely due to the native IO limitations.

This is one area where VMware ESX server really excels. VMFS is designed for high speed access and large file sizes and is way more efficient than NTFS when it comes to multiple simultaneous IO requests.

While I agree that VMware Server or Microsoft Virtual Server both provide an easy and very cost effective introduction to virtualization, it does come at a price in performance. There is no way, not currently at least, virtualization platforms that run on top of existing "full scale" Operating Systems will provide you with the performance that a thin hypervisor layer and a specially designed file system will give you. Nor will it provide you with the real failover and dynamic resource allocation features you'll find in an enterprise product.

And thats the whole point, VMware Server and Microsoft Virtual Server are not enterprise products, and VMware sure hasn't positioned or marketed VMWare Server as one.

Over at VMworld, where I would have loved to be right now, Microsoft has announced the VHD Download Center and the accompanying "Run IT on a Virtual Hard Disk" Technet site.

As of this moment, Microsoft is offering Windows Server 2003 R2, Exchange Server 2007, SQL Server 2005 and ISA Server 2006 as downloadable, preconfigured VHD's for evaluation purposes. You no longer need to download and install the base Windows OS, and then install trial versions of the offered applications. What you get when downloading is a pre-configured environment that lets evaluate the products for a 30-day time period, unless you are a MSDN and/or TechNet subscriber. MSDN/TechNet subscribers gets up to 365 day evaluation periods, when using their existing subscribers license keys.

Microsoft also expects that over 20 partners will be distributing their software through the VHD Test Drive Program including Altiris, BEA Systems, Check Point, Citrix, CommVault, Dell, FullArmor, HP, Network Appliance, Platespin, Portlock, Quest Software, SourceCode Technology Holdings, Symantec and UGS. In fact, Citrix is already offering a developer edition of Presentation Server 4.0 on the mycitrix site. The developer edition is a fully featured version of presentation server, that includes two free licenses. I'm sure a pre-configured virtual machine will be available real soon.

Of course the VHD downloads require Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, but I expect VMware Converter to be able to convert the VHD's to VMware images. I haven't looked at the VHD EULA, so I have no idea if Microsoft has put any limitations on the usage/conversion of the VHDs. I doubt it though, as Microsoft has opened up the VHD standard on their own, and offer that as the cure-all format for all virtualization needs. This is also the format that the planned hypervisor on Windows Longhorn will support natively. The VHD standard is a direct competitor to VMWare's VMDK format.

All in all, great move by Microsoft which can only be seen as a reponse to the VMware Virtual Appliances directory, which has a big, and still growing, set of Virtual Appliances ready for download.

The world of IT and IT management is getting better and easier on a daily basis now!