Server Virtualization
 

Hey Folks - We need your help. We were hoping, we could gain from your experience with implementing server virtualization. When should we be using Red Hat Virtualization, Citrix Virtualization, Xen Virtualization, Microsoft Virtualization, Oracle Virtualization and VMWare. I will be very interested in learning from your first hand experience. I will also like to know, under what situations is one virtualization preferred over the other. - Thanks for your help

My organisation is also thinking of implementing server virtualization but in a test environment.

We are going with Microsoft virtualization. Our main reason is just that we mainly use microsoft products .

Bear in mind that Citrix Presentation Server (Xen Server)is in itself virtulization.... If you running presentation server 3.0 or earlier do not virtualize, it does not play very well, 4.0 and above your fine.

But if you are publisihng desktops you are better off using physical hardware but if you are publisng applications, then you can go down the VM of Presentation server

I would say VMware is good and they provide good support. We are running around 8 linux image on one of the box and works like a charm.

2¢
 

There is no easy answer to your question due to many other issues that may or may not have anything to do with whatever your environment may require. My suggestion is for you to go to all vendors and download whitepapers and read case studies to see what their solution is and compare their solution to other vendors. So, first understand what each vendor offers and how it compares to others (features table - pretty much everyone has something like this). Then drill down deaper (whitepaper, case study) to understand their technology and again make your own conclusion once you have an informed opinion on each vendor technology. The last part of it would be "Management" features - this goes to the how it actually works in real life. Since virtual machines require management along with OS management, what is it, how does it work and does it fit with what you are looking to do and know. Ultimately though, you need to present solution to some higher up (CFO - most likely; disgusting person but whatever) and that person will ask one very simple question: How much? Read license statement from each vendor. So that's my short list of things you should do, though am sure I can add and you can add lots more than this simple list.

Here are my general remarks on vendors listed:

VMWare ESX - Community acceptance is high, cost is high - reliability high; there are other lower end products that VMware has but I would not think of using them in my production environment because it does not meet my environment needs.

Citrix Xen - Community acceptance is high, cost is moderate - reliability high; the new version of Xen has a great Admin Gui that previous version did not have and its a heck of an improvement. I have to read up more on what other updates it has but overall I have used it in my testing environment and I do have the confidence to put it on production systems if need be though I would need to properly read up on it to make sure it has all the things ESX offers my environment.

Oracle Virtualization - Community acceptance is moderate, cost (ITS ORACLE!!), reliability for me is unknown. Read on it but have no hands on knowledge of it.

Microsoft Virtualization - Community acceptance is low for Datacenter Admin (LOW - have never seen it used), Cost is low, Reliability (to be fair, I do not know). I have to look into it but am assuming that for testing environment it would be ok but again in my environment I would not be able to use it even in my testing lab.

Vmware is great. I have been using it at home for an information security course that I am doing.

I haven't used it on a work environment so I'm not sure how good will be there.

Just to butt in again, if you have not made your choice take a look at Xen Server in conjunction with a netapp file - go on, take a look

I found the free version of VMware to be very very slow on a machine with 2 gig and a 3 ghz processor. Perhaps their high end products are much better..

Great information thanks for sharing with us

Server virtualization is the masking of server resources, including the number and identity of individual physical servers, processors, and operating systems, from server users. The server administrator uses a software application to divide one physical server into multiple isolated virtual environments.