Why Virtualization Is So Darn Popular

re: Why Virtualization Is So Darn Popular

davidmeyer — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 01:19:00 GMT

Let me tell you our story. At my company we run A LOT of virtual macines. We started off on VMware's GSX server running on Dell 6600's with 32GB of memory. Even with that much ram we didn't have the ability to recognize the benefits of the machine. So, we switched all of these boxes to VMware's ESX server. Now we have our machines fully utilized and with all of the VM suite tools from VMware and CA (NSM and ASM) we have a rock solid environment.

I'd be curious to know why I should switch to MS Virtual Server. What do you give me that ESX server doesn't? One of the reasons we switched was because of the overhead that Server 2003 required as compared to ESX.

Is there a plan to address this issue?

re: Why Virtualization Is So Darn Popular

rhorn — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 20:45:50 GMT

It's clear from the article on the XenSource and Microsoft partnership that Microsoft is making it easier for XenSource to port Xen itself to Longhorn, thus allowing Xen-enabled OSes to run on top of Longhorn, but there is still many of us that would like to run Longhorn as a guest inside Linux or other Xen supported hosts.

It's not clear from that article that Microsoft is making it easier for Xen to do just that. Granted, the VT-enabled hardware from both AMD and Intel should allow for any guest OS in an unmodified form, but what about slightly older hardware without this technology? Will Microsoft sell a Xen-aware version of Longhorn (or maybe even Vista)?

re: Why Virtualization Is So Darn Popular

Cay — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 21:21:08 GMT

Sadly there is no comment on the different design of the hyper visor in this article which really makes the differences on security, capacity management and true segmentation of resources

re: Why Virtualization Is So Darn Popular

VirtuStream — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 04:43:07 GMT

I'd be interested to know what your take is on the few companies out there that are "streaming" operating systems and applications over the network without compromising bandwidth, without requiring proprietary hardware, and bypassing PC and server hard drives altogether.