Virtual Server Options
We are presently working on a project to convert all of our servers to virtual servers. There seems to be a number of players in this arena and I wanted to just present them for all to see.
Each of these come with an open source/freeware version that can be used indefinitely for as long as you want.
VMWare
Obviously, the big boy in the field. These guys have recently gone public with their stock and have made a big splash. They have several different products but their server virtualization product is what interests me. Here is what their website has to say:
Begin enjoying the benefits of server virtualization with the free VMware Server. VMware Server installs on any existing server hardware and partitions a physical server into multiple virtual machines by abstracting processor, memory, storage and networking resources, giving you greater hardware utilization and flexibility. Streamline software development and testing and simplify server provisioning as you utilize the ability to “build once, deploy many times.”
- Provision a new server in minutes without investing in new hardware
- Simplify IT testing of patches, new applications and operating systems
- The benefits of server virtualization can be realized by a company of any size
- Website: http://www.vmware.com
- Download: http://www.vmware.com/download/
XenSource
- Packaged Xen Virtualization
- Blazing Fast Performance for Windows and Linux Guests
- XenCenter Single Server Management
- Seamless Upgrade Path to XenServer™ and XenEnterprise™
- Free
XenExpress v4 is a free, production-ready virtualization platform that enables everyone to quickly get started with Xen virtualization. Easily installed and seamlessly upgradeable, XenExpress is your on-ramp to Xen and the XenSource v4 product family.
XenExpress v4 offers all of the base performance, tools, and easy to use features of XenEnterprise v4 and is built to run on the broadest range of standard server hardware. It supports dual socket servers with up to 4GB of RAM and can host up to four virtual machines on each system.
XenExpress v4 can be quickly upgraded to the richer capabilities of XenServer or XenEnterprise by the simple addition of a license key, with no need to reinstall software or convert guests.
- Website: http://www.xensource.com
- Download: http://www.xensource.com/Pages/XenExpress.aspx
Virtual Iron
Virtual Iron provides enterprise-class software for server virtualization & virtual infrastructure management. The product offers comparable capabilities and performance to established proprietary offerings – for just a fraction of the cost.
By taking full advantage of industry standards and open source economics, Virtual Iron dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of virtualization and for the first time, makes production-ready capabilities available to the mainstream market.
A Comprehensive Virtualization Solution
Virtual Iron enables server partitioning for single and multi-server configuration, no downtime virtual server migration (LiveMigrate™), advanced management capabilities for rapid provisioning, high availability and disaster recovery (LiveRecovery™) and capacity management (LiveCapacity™). With these advanced capabilities, users can:
- Virtualize enterprise-class workloads running on unmodified Windows and Linux operating systems.
- Improve the utilization of current systems and reduce power, space and cooling issues through server consolidation.
- Quickly set up development, test and production environments.
- Recover from failures quickly, reliably and cost-efficiently.
- Match resource capacity to workload demands automatically.
- Reduce human labor and errors via policy-based automation.
- Website: http://www.virtualiron.com/
- Download: http://www.virtualiron.com/products/download_single_server.cfm
17 Responses to “Virtual Server Options”
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Rob C Says:
September 5th, 2007 at 7:09 amI have started doing this at home with a fairly robust box that was sitting at about 15% CPU usage all day. I have copied over a number of different systems and set them up to run as virtual servers on top of this one box.
The result is less computers running in the house and no slow down or degrading of the services at all. -
eric greer Says:
September 5th, 2007 at 8:16 amWhat about Microsoft Virtual PC?
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Tim Fehlman Says:
September 5th, 2007 at 8:26 amVirtual PC would not really be an enterprise option but Virtual Server would be. Unfortunately, it is a bit limited in the number of operating systems that it can host plus it does not have a lot of the failover and recovery options that I am looking at.
Tim
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University Update - Open Source - Virtual Server Options Says:
September 5th, 2007 at 8:52 am[…] Virtual Server Options » This Summary is from an article posted at Daily Cup of Tech on Wednesday, September 05, 2007 [ […]
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Andrew Says:
September 5th, 2007 at 9:22 amNot sure if you looked at Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, but if not, you may want to. MS has come a long way and is being very active in their development of the Virtual Server product line.
- Andrew
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Matt B Says:
September 5th, 2007 at 9:36 amI’ve used VMware server a lot. I use it installed on a Ubuntu server install (see here for instructions). It’s a great solution with a very small footprint. It’s not really up to mission critical apps but for simple boxes that don’t do very much, it fantastic.
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Kim Jalun Says:
September 5th, 2007 at 10:40 amThis is a pretty big list Tim:
the unofficial list of which OSes work and which don’t in Microsoft Virtual PC 2004
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Billy Says:
September 5th, 2007 at 11:05 amI’m sorry to ask such a silly question, but what is the advantage of a virtual machine? I know basically what it is, but I don’t know why you would want to do that. (instead of a dual boot system, for example)
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Flatlinebb Says:
September 5th, 2007 at 3:56 pm@Billy: Dual-booting would not work well at all in a server environment, where uptime is critical. Would you reboot your company’s exchange server, just so you could pop into your sandbox Linux install for a few?
The advantage of virtualization is that you can run multiple servers concurrently on a single physical server, saving physical space and electricity; you can move the virtual OS from one piece of hardware to another much easier, which helps in disaster recovery; and it makes development much easier, by allowing you to run multiple versions of an OS without needing extra hardware.
I’m sure there are much more benefits, but these are the ones that come to mind right now.
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John May Says:
September 5th, 2007 at 5:48 pmSo, how exactly does a virtual server work? I’m assuming this software, VMware for example, runs on top of Windows Server and allows for another installation of Windows in the virtual machine, but from my experience things are far from speedy. I’ve used VMWare workstation and it was ok for testing operating systems, but for production, I would never consider it because it is way too slow. I’ll need to do some more research on this topic.
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Matt B Says:
September 6th, 2007 at 3:50 amJohn May - Yes, VMware (generally speaking) needs an O/S on the machine to interact with the harware. This can be windows or *nix, and probably many others. I think the higher end VMWare products (like ESX server) can install standalone, ie they don’t need an O/S, but I think you need certified hardware.
VMware Workstation is a little slow, in my experience, but that is probably because I have only run it on a workstation with a limited amount of memory. We have a dedicated 64 bit machine that runs Ubuntu server and Vmware server. That is a lot faster than the workstations I have run. There is an overhead but it’s not that far off the ‘real’ thing.
Billy - One of the real advantages of VM’s for me, is the ability to do snapshots. This takes a copy of the disk at a given moment in time and then you can roll back to it at any point. It’s great for testing, when you realise you’ve screwed something up. Simply roll it back and you are good to go!
There are loads of other advantages, but if you want a list have a look at the VMware site. They give a massive list of reasons that they are brilliant etc!
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Bill Says:
September 7th, 2007 at 2:03 amI’ve used Parallels, VMware, and Microsoft Virtual PC.
I prefer VMware. I’m currently using Virtual PC (not my choice, but it does what we need to do at college, plus we have a subscription to msdn :P) on a XP Pro machine, with 2 virtual Windows Server 2003 installations. The two installations are networking together as domain controllers, active directory is installed.
Virtualization is pretty cool, and I could definitely see more companies moving in that direction. I personally will think about doing a lot more virtual stuff in the next couple of years when I goto buy a new computer. I’ll get one with a lot of memory.
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Nate Says:
September 7th, 2007 at 7:03 pmTim, we are in the process of evaluating virtualization products as well. I would be interested in your findings about these products.
One roadblock I have already hit is that none of our machines here support hardware virtualization, which is required for running Windows guests in Xen Express. Our environment is all Windows, so we’re looking at virtualizing Server 2003. We may soon buy a dedicated machine for this purpose.
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K-IntheHouse Says:
September 13th, 2007 at 2:19 pmI have tried XenSource in SLES 10 and I was impressed with its performance even on a dsktop machine. The ease with which I could create multiple virtual machines was excellent.
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OSS-biz Says:
October 11th, 2007 at 11:54 pmThis article is a good round up of 3 major Virtual Server options. The second one, Xen, is open source and becoming a major force in the virtualization field. It is the major option available on Red Hat and Fedora. -Article
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Matt Says:
August 28th, 2008 at 10:20 amI was wondering if there is a freeware way to have a virtualized windows pc (XP, Server or even 2k) within a completely mac environment. I have it running on 10.5 Mac Server
Any thoughts?
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Matt Says:
August 28th, 2008 at 10:22 amSorry I meant I WOULD have it running on OS X Server
