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VMware ESX & VM Server Differences Explained

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One item that I have seen come up again and again recently with my customers is a mis-understanding of ESX and VM Server.  Particularly the performance aspects of both.  These are two entirely different products with entirely different goals that need to be kept in mind when comparing the two.

VM Server is the free server virtualization product from VMware.  It’s purpose was to help seed the market and get people more confortable and familiar with virtualization concepts on the server.  What better way to do that than give something away for free for people to play with!  VM Server is similar to VM Workstation/Fusion in that it runs on top of an OS; so from the ground up you have:

server hardware > operating system > VM Server > virtual machine.

This means VM Server inherets the same performance issues that the OS has.  It also means that it has to rely on the OS for a lot for the management of resources.  Net result:  the performance of VM Server will be impacted by the OS you are running it on top of.

ESX is the data center grade hyperadvisor from VMware.  It’s purpose is to provide virtualization for  business critical data centers.  ESX essentially doesn’t run on top of an OS.  You can think of it as a data center OS as it is the base layer for the Virtual Infrastructure set of products. Similarily, from the ground up you have:

server hardware > ESX > virtual machines

You can see immediately that ESX has eliminated the operating system level, this is the source of the performance gain that ESX provides.  It is running on top of the raw hardware.  It is truely a specialized OS with the sole pupose of virtualization.

One thing that VM Server and ESX share, is the engine to run a virtual machine.  This engine has lots of tricks built into it to manage the physical resources of the box and to distribute them efficiently to the virutal machines that need them.  Of couse, you still suffer from that extra piece of the base operating system under VM Server.  This is why you can have VM Server running with no VMs and still see it utilizing resources.  It’s doing the work of interfacing with the base OS for resource management even when no one is using the resources.

So, if you hear somone complain about their VMs are not performing very well ask them which product they are using.  If they are using VM Server, point them here.  If they are running ESX, then it’s time to dive into the typical operating system and application stack tuning/debugging routine.

(Disclosure: I currently work at VMware as a Solutions Consultant)

3-2-1 Launchpad

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Today I introduced the VMW Launchpad.  A collection of information resources from or related to VMware.  Since starting at VMware as a Solutions Consultant, I have been collecting items that are frequently requested from my customers and others regarding VMware and our products.  I’ll be updating the Lauchpad as a reference source for those common items.  I will also be posting some personal write ups based upon my experiences.

And of course all these items, along with the rest of this blog, reflects my views and not the views of any company, employer, or group associated with me.

(Disclaimer: I am currently employeed at VMware as a Solutions Consultant)

The Dawn of a New Era

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“The Dawn of a New Era”.  That was the slogan that Intel used 30 years ago when they introduced the x86 processor.  And very fitting today for me as I start out a new era in the x86 virtualization space.  Last week I started working at VMware as a Solutions Consultant on the Global Accounts team.  This means that I will be responsible for selling the VMware virtualization solutions to a hand full of very large companies.

While I was talking to VMware about this position, I was impressed with how far they have taken the virtualization technology.  I was one of the 60,000 people who downloaded Workstation 1.0 during the first two months when it was released back in the Spring of 1999.  It was amazing with regards to what it could do back then.  But the magic wore off for me eventually; for most of last year I was using it to run my “work laptop” as a VM on my personal laptop at my previous job (the reason being that my personal laptop was a hell of a lot more powerful than what my employer gave me).  The magic had turned into rock solid technology, it did what it was supposed to and did it well.

But then I started to learn about the management and automation technologies that VMware has built and aquired over the past few years.  With my recent work within software development organizations at Fortune 100 companies, I immediately knew all the benefits to application development teams.   And when I saw a demonstration of Lab Manager, I was in awe once again with the magic.  Being able to run and test a multi-computer software configuration through a web browser and then saving a state of those machines as a bug…that is amazing.  And that is just one of the management/automation tools.

I feel that virtualization currently is and will continue to be the most transforming technology for enterprise computing for the rest of this decade.  That is the reason I decided to join VMware.  So, expect to see more and more postings here in the labs on virtualization moving forward.  Of course, everything I write here will continue to be my own opinion and not that of VMware.

Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m giving up my focus on some of the other technology areas that I have been focusing on lately (i.e., SaaS, Web2.0, Social Computing).  I will still be keeping an eye on many things in those areas and writing about them as time permits.  There are still experiments in the works at the lab…