Joshua Penix wrote: > 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. :) >
Thanks for the nice overview! Who could ask for anything more? ;-) I guess I'm interpreting aol correctly that (xen) full virtualization just plain doesn't work for Windows guests. That's disappointing -- the promise was too good to be true, I suppose. Regards, .jim -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
