On Dec 16, 2007, at 10:16 PM, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
James G. Sack (jim) wrote:
How do they structure their fees, for say selling product
containing VMWare.
The person to ask about that kind of stuff is Joshua. They have a
significant install of VMWare ESX Server at one of the places he
works.
VMware has three core product lines. The first that most people
probably know is VMware Workstation, which has been around for ~8
years and frequently used by developers or Linux people who
occasionally need Windows. It's still available and very capable for ~
$150/machine. It's not meant for a server environment... up until the
most recent version, all display access was local machine only. It
has things like advanced VM snapshot branching and virtual machine
groups which are perfect for development/QA work.
The second product which is now becoming hugely popular is the free
VMware Server. This can run on top of most any modern Windows or
Linux OS and let you run a wide mix of guest OSes. It has tools for
remote access and management, so it's more friendly to server
environments.
Once you get beyond the need for just a few scattered VMware Server
hosts, you get into environments that need centralized management,
load balancing, shared storage, failover clustering abilities and bare-
metal hypervisor performance. That calls for VMware ESX, which
suddenly vaults you from cheap/free to the ~$5k/host price bracket.
But if you look at the falling cost and rising power of x86 hardware,
even with $5k of license fees per box, you still can build an
enormously powerful and redundant system for relatively cheap.
For example, the particular ESX install that Andy referred to is built
from three dual-socket dual-core Xeon servers with 8GB RAM (recycled
from their previous under-utilized single-machine duty) and three dual-
socket quad-core Xeon servers with 16GB RAM. They're attached via
FiberChannel to a 10TB Compellent SAN in a fully redundant fabric.
Putting together the SAN, the server hardware, the fiber hardware and
switches and the VMware licenses puts the cost for the system at a bit
above $100k. But for that you get a 36-core compute cluster with 72GB
of RAM that is capable of running the entire set of (primarily Linux
and Windows) servers necessary for a ~200 person engineering firm.
It's capable of withstanding two host failures and still running its
full workload. It's possible to stuff your hand in the back of the
server rack, pick *any* cable you want, and yank it out without
affecting any production services. It's also running in 16 Us of rack
space, effectively halving the space and power requirements of what it
replaced.
Outside of VMware, I also work with Xen regularly -- both Open Source
(generally RedHat/CentOS 5.1 as a base) and the commercial XenServer
Enterprise (now owned by Citrix). For pure Linux environments, Open
Source Xen is hard to beat... assuming you can do everything
paravirtualized. As Andy is finding, non-Linux stuff falls pretty
flat on Xen when it has to be crammed into the hardware virtualized
(HVM) model, and doing so is only an option on very modern CPUs.
XenServer Enterprise helps with the non-Linux OS issue a bit... at
least as far as Windows goes. The key is that XenServer has developed
their own closed source set of drivers for Windows that are Xen-aware,
letting portions of Windows (network, disk) effectively run
paravirtualized. They've also put together a decent set of management
tools and support for shared storage and failover that mimics a
portion of what ESX offers.
I'm in the process of building a two-node XenServer Enterprise system
with shared iSCSI backend storage to replace ~8 standalone Linux and
Windows servers for a ~50 user electronic parts brokerage firm. We
were originally considering a VMware-based solution, but with a budget
of around ~$25k, the VMware licenses were a bit too dear. And without
the need for as much redundancy, some of ESX's features would have
gone to waste. Instead, XenServer Enterprise fit the bill perfectly
and only cost $2.5k per server. That left lots of room for the actual
hardware and storage, yet still gives them the benefits of
virtualization and some failover capacity. And the bread rack full of
3-5 year old tower servers can now be retired in favor of a half-rack
full of quiet and power-efficient stuff in the corner.
If you have interest in XenServer, they also have a free edition.
XenServer is a bare-metal appliance-type solution - you boot the CD
and it installs and takes over the machine. The free version is
limited to only four guest machines. There's also a mid-level
"Standard" edition that removes the guest limit, but cannot do the
shared storage and failover that the Enterprise edition can do.
So there you go Jim... depending on your needs, virtualization can
range from $Free to $5000 per server. :)
--
Joshua Penix http://www.binarytribe.com
Binary Tribe Linux Integration Services & Network Consulting
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
