[THIN] Re: VMWare ESX
- From: "Evan Mann" <emann@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 17:27:19 -0500
Wow, people still go out and buy dedicated machines for DHCP and WINS
these days? Hopefully you don't even need WINS anymore (in a perfect MS
world). I just runs DNS/DHCP/WINS on my DCs and have 2 DCs with these
services. Somewhat of a standard practice IMO. I've seen people split
them up however, but never dedcating a server as powerful as a
PE1650/DL360 just for that. If everyone had unlimuited budgets however,
that would make for an impressive server array :/
Anyways, Using VMWare ESX would let you have even MORE redundancy for
things like that. Instead of 2 DNS servers, you could have 4 of them.
Definitely a cool item, but in the end, you're still relying on ONE
server instead of many, and when things break, it's usually the
hardware, not the software. So there is still the hardware bottleneck.
I see VMWare ESX's biggest advantage being the ability to have multiple
redundant systems and having the freedom to test/reboot/whatever
machines more freely then you would when you have to rely on having
dedicated hardware for everything.
It would be a good product for a test lab environment.
-----Original Message-----
From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Chris Lynch
Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 5:19 PM
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] Re: VMWare ESX
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Exactly. When someone wants to add another service to the network, like
a DHCP server or WINS server, they go out an purchase something like a
PE1650 or Proliant DL360. This is a waste of system resources.
Now, image that you have two DL380's, or PE2650's, or PE6650's. Connect
to
an external SCSI array or SAN for storage. You have ESX running on
both
servers. One server contains a DC with DNS, the other has another DC
with DNS. Install a SQL server, or a MF server, or even a F&P server.
You would add another guest OS and partition the host hardware to those
machines.
Chris
- -----Original Message-----
From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Bernd Harzog
Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 1:54 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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