Edward Ned Harvey <[email protected]> writes:
> 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.
You may find that investigating a "container" solution like OpenVZ brings you
more joy than pain for the use-case you are talking about: a single kernel
image, with each container looking enough like an independent OS that you can
reasonably deploy anything inside them. I find it a vastly better solution
that "pretend hardware" or paravirtualized solutions for almost all of what
I need to do.
(*BSD Jails are more or less the same sort of solution, and Solaris has some
equivalent, I understand, in recent releases.)
[...]
> 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.
That would be ESX; ESXi is much, much smaller and doesn't have a real OS in
the management partition, just the absolute bare-bones. This means that
unlike ESX you *don't* get to install random (out-of-date) Linux software.
This bites when, for example, you can't get RAID hardware monitoring because
VMWare say the vendor needs to ship them a version of the monitoring tools
specific to ESXi, and the vendor doesn't care enough. (*cough* Adaptec)
ESXi is small enough that some Dell hardware, and perhaps other vendors, ship
with it in firmware though, so a diskless ESXi server is completely possible.
> c. The console client “vsphere client” is windows-only; you can’t
> manage your VM’s from a mac or linux
There is a completely disastrous admin thing at the console, but this is more
or less true.
Regards,
Daniel
--
✣ Daniel Pittman ✉ [email protected] ☎ +61 401 155 707
♽ made with 100 percent post-consumer electrons
Looking for work? Love Perl? In Melbourne, Australia? We are hiring.
_______________________________________________
Tech mailing list
[email protected]
http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech
This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators
http://lopsa.org/
