[THIN] Re: VMWare ESX
- From: "Claudio Rodrigues" <crodrigues@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 17:07:27 -0500
Well I think the key thing is if you have the servers running in VMWare
instances you can even move the virtual server to a different hardware
without disconnecting users or disrupting anything. So I guess it is a
tradeoff between performance and uptime. With VMWare you may get less
users per VM in a quad then two real duals but with multiple VMs you
will be able to do tricks like that, what is not possible with real
servers. :-)
-----Original Message-----
From: Bernd Harzog [mailto:Bernd.Harzog@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: December 4, 2003 4:54 PM
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] Re: VMWare ESX
Steve,
You bring up an excellent point about using VMWare to
consolidate physical servers that are lightly used into a set of logical
servers on one or two physical boxes. That make a heck of a lot of
sense, and we are seeing quite a few of our customers go down this road.
What we have not seen that much of, and what your point about
overhead brings up, is people taking relatively heavily loaded dual CPU
Citrix servers and collapsing them into quads, eight-ways, or even
larger machines. The reason that I think we have not seen this is that
people perceive that the overhead of VMware means that you end up with
fewer concurrent users on two VM's on a quad, then you would with two
separate dual CPU servers.
I am wondering if anyone can verify what we are seeing in our
customer base, or if anyone has different experiences.
By way of a TScale plug, we have customers running TScale inside
of their VMware partitions so as to get more scalability and performance
inside of those partitions. It actually works quite well.
Cheers,
Bernd Harzog
CEO
RTO Software, Inc.
bernd.harzog@xxxxxxxxxxx
678-455-5506 x701
www.rtosoft.com <http://www.rtosoft.com/>
-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Greenberg [mailto:steveg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 4:35 PM
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] Re: VMWare ESX
It is a technology which allows you to run a complete Operating
System on top of another Operating system. So, if you are running
Windows XP, you can launch a process which is a complete instance of
Windows 2000 or LINUX, for example. The HOST operating system sees the
GUEST operating system as if it is a program running locally while the
GUEST OS "thinks" it has it's won hardware available.
The ESX server product is an Enterprise version of this
capability which dedicates and optimizations a multi CPU server, i.e. 4
or 8 way Pentium, as a platform for running multiple instances of
operating systems. This is very useful for test environments and for
consolidate many servers into less hardware. Many of our clients, for
example, end up with 10 or 20 servers that are doing very small tasks
such as DHCP, licensing, hosting a specific database or application,
middleware, etc. In reality they end up maintaining these 10 or 20
servers when they may only use a few % of their resources. For
application compatibility reasons, OS version requirements, etc. you
often cannot combine these roles. So you use VMWare ESX as a way to run
all of those functions on one server which the ability to assign RAM and
PROCESSOR to each session as needed.
In a Citrix context, it is a way to build a complete
multi-server farm functionally while maintaining much less hardware. In
some cases the overhead is not worth it, in others the simplification of
hardware and resource allocation outweighs any loss in raw performance.
Regards,
Steve Greenberg
Thin Client Computing
34522 N. Scottsdale Rd. suite D8453
Scottsdale, AZ 85262
(602) 432-8649
(602) 296-0411 fax
steveg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
-----Original Message-----
From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Luchette, Jon
Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 1:37 PM
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] VMWare ESX
Hey,
Can somebody give me a high level overview of what VMWare is all
about? We have been looking at moving towards a Blade server platform
for our 10 Citrix servers specifically, and I am trying to see if VMWare
is something we should look into or not. Is it extremely expensive?
What exactly does it allow us as administrators to do? Is it to be used
in conjunction with Blade servers or as an alternative? The brochures
and white papers on their website are confusing the hell out of me!
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks guys,
/jL
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