Re: Virtualization

I have experience with VMWare (player, server, workstation, and ESX),
Virtual box, and Parallels.  

VMWare is more mature and has the best support across OSs. Another key
to running any virtual environment is lots and lots of RAM. Installing
the VMWare tools are a must for obtaining the best performance from the
virtual machines. If you are planning on putting your VM's on a shared
storage really take a strong look at VMWare and using NFS for the shared
storage. You might find that running VMs over NFS will have better
performance than even iSCSI or FC.  This is due to the VMWare Server I/O
is small block and extremely random which means that bandwidth matters
little.

Virtual box is nice and Windows XP did seem to be a little more
responsive but other OS seemed to suffer.  

Parallels is also nice but not something that I would used for a
multi-VM server environment.

Eric








On Tue, 2008-02-12 at 11:21 -0700, Aaron wrote:
> I have played a bit with VMWare, mostly the free server.
> It seems to do what I need, but I do prefer OSS over Free whenever possible.
> 
> My main complaint is that it is unresponsive to the screen.
> Mouse movements, window placement, are all clumsy.
> I guess the commercial workstation product is better in this respect,
> but still not like running directly on the hardware.
> 
> I have also not yet gone all the way to configure a proper virtual 
> network, and share disks as I would want on a production configuration.
> I am wanting the guest OS to share files with the host.
> 
> Xen seems pretty popular, but it seems to demand a LINUX host.
> It also wants a custom kernel for max performance.
> I'm happy to make custom kernels/patches for LINUX host and guest,
> but I fear that it, too, will be too clumsy to use interactively with
> a windows guest.
> 
> VirtualBox seems to run under both Windows and LINUX hosts (i think).
> At least it will work with a Windows host.   I'm seeing less press on
> this one.
> 
> Does anybody on this list have experience with more than one of these,
> and care to compare?
> 
> My main use is to make applications designed to run on several boxes,
> windows front-end, LINUX back-end, run on a single box.
> On a more personal side, I'd be interested in seeing if I can throw
> out my mandatory windows development/testing box for a VM.
> I do have interest in both Windows and LINUX host OS's.
> Windows host for deliveries.
> LINUX host for personal and in-house use.
> 
>               aaron
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> 



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