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VMWare Plays Hard-Ball with Hyper-V

  

The Register is today reporting of VMWares apparent response to Microsoft Hyper-V’s competitive pricing scheme – tipped to be a wide factor in the uptake of the Redmond based technology. It is reported that VMWare have slashed the price of VMWare ESXi to $0 - also known as free – in an attempt to stop customers from deserting to the infant hypervisor technology implemented by Uncle Bill and co.

As of yet, im unsure as to what the difference beetween ESXi and Vi3 is – are they one and the same, or is ESXi the hypervisor, but Vi3 includes all the management features, VMotion etc? If anyone knows please drop me a line at sam@sam-marsh.net or leave a post on here!

I intend to download myself a free copy of ESXi and install it on one of the servers in our data centre by the end of next week so i can see for myself how it fares as a free OS. This price slash on ESXi will not only rock the boat for Microsoft, but for their other main competitor, Citrix XenSource, which is also free. Now if you ask me, personally the only reason i’d have chosen Xen over ESX in previous years was the fact that ESX costs an arm and a leg to finance – now that it is free i cant see many viable reasons for going to Xen over ESX, except for potential hardware support benefits (storage drivers spring to mind).

The link to download ESXi for free is here : http://www.vmware.com/go/getesxi

 

Tags: Citrix, ESX, ESXi, The Register, VMWare, Xen

VMNetworking Throughput

In normal P2P transfer/ad-hoc network transfer; the data transfer rate (MBps) is constrained by the medium; the NIC, the stack and the drivers, normally limiting to either 100Mbps or 1000Mbps (full/half). These are physical issues which need to be addressed at a layer 1 level / layer 2 level.

My question to you, the world, is – why arent virtual networking p2p transfers faster? If you want to transfer files beetween 1 VM and another VM; the transfer should be upwards of 1/2GBps – as you are transferring files in beetween the same file system (granted via a few security measures). There is no interaction with the physical NIC’s or mediums at all. In theory, all it will be doing (please correct me if wrong), is transferring a file out of the virtual machine hard drive, from the hard drive through the VM Container, out onto the VMBus/Hypervisor bus, back into the other container, and then into the other VM’s hard drive. The only constraint here, is the TCP/IP stack, which im sure can be slightly modified / a new protocol made for VM Transfer, allowing 2/3/4 GBps and upwards transfer.

[Shamelessly stolen from my Personal blog, written July 2008, Sam Marsh 2008 (c)]

Tags: Networking, p2p, Security, Throughput, VM, VMWare

Lets Get Started: Para-Virtualization

First off, i’d like to just get the site kicked off with a brief +/- i wrote a few weeks ago on Para-virtualization.

http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/8415/800pxviridianarchitecturl4.png

+ Paravirtualization (PV) provides major security benefits, as the host server generally cannot access the virtual machines inside (if compromised) unlike Full Virtualization (FV). Also, virtual machines are totally black-boxed, and cannot see other VM’s on the same server.

+ PV provides an infrastructure with a lot more redundancy, backup and fail-over options than FV; using proprietary technologies such as “VMotion” (VMWare) which allow a virtual machine to be ran across 2 separate physical hosts in 2 separate locations.

- PV is expensive to run; as you will need hardware that is officially supported to run the hardware on (generally), compared to FV, such as VMWare Server, which you can install on any hardware running a supported Operating system such as Ubuntu, Win. XP, etc.

http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/images/2007/11/15/multimode.png

- Most common variant of Virtualization used in the Enterprise today.
- Examples include VMWare ESX/Vi3, XenSource aka Citrix.
- Uses a “Hypervisor” or Virtual Machine Monitor, to allow multiple OS to run on a host computer simultaneously. VMWare uses vmkernel as its Hypervisor.

Tomorrow -  Hypervisor types.

Tags: Add new tag, ESX, Hyper V, Hypervisor, Microsoft, Para, Para-Virtualization, Ubuntu, Virtualization, VMWare, Windows, Windows XP