I can't believe, after all these years, and countless deployments, I'm still so dramatically dissatisfied with virtualization. Wondering if anyone knows something that doesn't suck. I may have some incomplete or incorrect information, so please - comment your heart out. ;-)
It is worth note, that my target is small office, small business. I'm not looking at any crazy awesome enterprise products. I don't have the ability to do things like head migration due to lack of shared storage, so that's not an issue for me. My specific goals are: Cover the basics. Let there be a single server, with several servers inside it. A small team of IT people manage these machines remotely. Of course most of the server admin will be done via ssh / rdp / vnc, but it's nice to be able to run multiple remote consoles. Reliability is #1. No matter what may be wrong, I've got to know I have some way to get to the console, and get there every time. 1. VMWare Server a. I revisited this today, on a centos host, and found: If you use IE for the console session, then you can click the pull-down menu, and "Send ctrl-alt-del" but the firefox version of the console client doesn't have any way to send ctrl-alt-del, and that's a problem because IE ain't available in centos. I can get a console from my windows machine, but not from the actual VM host machine. I tried ctrl-alt-ins also. It works if I'm physically at the host machine using firefox, but does not work if I'm VNC'd into the host machine. b. The bugginess made my skin crawl. First, I needed to insert a CD, and then eject and insert another CD, and the VM guest still showed the contents of CD#1. Then I ejected, disconnected the virtual CDROM device, reconnected the device, and re-inserted the CD, and it worked. Until half way through the CD when it refused to read some file. So I rebooted, and that cleared it up. c. I'm connected from one client. And I connect from another . suddenly both clients die, and neither one can open up again. Until a half hour later, while I've been googling around and testing this or that, when it magically fixes itself for no apparent reason. 2. VMWare ESXi (free) a. I have not yet actually used this, so tell me where I'm wrong. Based on what I read on the internet . b. You install bare metal. It's supposedly a version of RHEL. So you must be using RHEL supported hardware in order to install. c. The console client "vsphere client" is windows-only; you can't manage your VM's from a mac or linux d. Even though it's supposedly RHEL, you can't do normal linuxy things, like login and get a command prompt. You can't do much more than just change your IP address. I wonder if there's any way to backup your VM's by copying the VM files out of the host.. Because it's not a normal host OS, I have my doubts. 3. VMWare Workstation a. This is one of the few products I'm reasonably happy with. I run it on a vista 64 machine, with windows server, linux, and solaris guests. It's pretty solid. b. Only problem is $160. Sometimes worth it, sometimes not. c. This is meant to be a desktop product, so you can only get a guest console from the local host machine. d. I seem to remember learning (but I'm shaky on this now) that you can't automatically boot your guest OSes when the host boots up. 4. VMWare Fusion a. I never used it. Mac only. It looks like a direct competitor of Parallels Desktop. I wonder what the pros/cons are for Fusion vs Parallels 5. Parallels Desktop (mac) a. This too is solid, in a way. I encounter some bugs here and there, but nothing serious. Little things, like I can't see my mouse cursor over a PuTTY window, and sometimes the guest OS system clock will be 1 hour off, and stuff like that. b. Problem is, you can only use it on a mac. And like hell will I ever buy a mac server. c. This is meant to be a desktop product, so you can only get a guest console from the local host machine. 6. Parallels Server a. Only for OSX Servers. *cough* 7. Sun Virtualbox 3 a. Boy oh boy, this has come a long way since virtualbox 2. b. Still, it's very buggy. Graphic distortion in the config screens, screen flicker in the guest. Twice, just by installing/uninstalling it on my laptop, it permanently hosed my network adapters and I had to do a System Restore. c. A little feature lacking. For example: Once your guest is powered on, you absolutely cannot change anything, like, switch from Bridged to NAT, or add a hard drive for example. You have to power off in order to change your network adapter or change any of the hardware settings. d. This is meant to be a desktop product, so you can only get a guest console from the local host machine. 8. Virtual Machine Manager and Xen a. I'm not sure if the problem is more VMM or Xen. They both suck. Maybe some of this will improve with KVM, but you're still stuck with VMM b. Once a CD is inserted (let's say an ISO file is used) you can't change CD's while the machine is on. You have to shutdown the machine in order to change the ISO file. This is particularly a problem if you install the OS from a set of ISO CD images. c. There's some serious memory leakage going on here. Sometimes one of my virtual guest machine servers starts behaving strange, and users ask me to check it. So I open the console of Guest A, and get the screen of Guest B. So I try to open the console of Guest B, only to discover Guest B is now dead. Solution: Reboot. d. Xen seems to crash my guests . Almost monthly. I'm going to guess the average is once in 5-6 weeks. Makes me pee my bed at night. e. Again - I'm not sure if this is meant to be just a desktop product or not - but you can only get a guest console from the local host machine. 9. MS Virtual PC 2004/2007 a. Doesn't even deserve this much mention, it's such a hunk of crap 10. Windows Virtual PC for Windows 7 a. Don't know yet. Haven't tried. 11. MS Hyper-V Server a. Haven't tried it. Don't know.
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