[THIN] Re: VMWare ESX
- From: "Bernd Harzog" <Bernd.Harzog@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 16:53:37 -0500
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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