Joy of ESX

On to bigger things for a bit - I've been setting up virtual machine servers for work and, in parallel, something similar on a home build.

I run VMWare Workstation 6.X on the U810 and have run Workstation and/or VMWare Server 1.X on various home machines for some time (since Workstation V2.X in fact). In general, VMWare has performed well for me both for hosting dev environments but also a multi-server home environment. As a result, it was a no brainer to go for it for the work build - to replace an ageing GSX Server of some antiquity.

The work server came pre-built with VMWare ESX 3.X as requested but had sat around for a bit before we got it installed so by then we had our 4.0 upgrade keys. 3.X had an annoying dependence a Windows box with Active Directory on to do basic VM maintenence but 4.X has an improved web interface that meant we could ditch the Windows (we don't need HA/clustering the way VMWare does it).

OK, so we install 4.X and discover that EMC has thoughfully removed the raw disk access feature - which is a bit of a pain as I have a 48-disk array that I wanted to mount as raw-disks and use ZFS on a VM rather than a RAID controller. The functionality is still there but it requires manual hackery of disks which is not what I want in a production system. Nuts - time to buy a storage controller.

Since the Web interface on 4.X looked reasonable, I thought it made sense to upgrade my home system to VMWare Server 2.X which is free but sports the same Web interface - and it does raw drives! I built it on a new install on OpenSuse 11.0 - with a pair of 4GB CF cards as the boot drive (mirrored using linux md) - which made for useful re-use of the flash optimisations I did on the U810. For personal use, I rather like hosted virtual environments on Linux - I can use Compiz/Expo configured with a to view all my VM's consoles, live - zooming in to any one to work. Great when you're working on multi-server apps.

Unfortunately, I could not get the Web interface to run reliably - it would lock up on Windows or Linux clients, sometimes not come up at all, the server process would die unexpectedly - looking at the VMWare forums it appears that this is an unfixed "feature". Server 1.X with it's native client worked fine but was getting long in the tooth. Time to look elsewhere.

Enter Virtualbox - which is missing several features of VMWare (64-bit VM's on non-VT/AMD-V processors, Windows 98 guest support, Web interface) but, to compensate has a few other nice features - RDP access to VM's, working admin console and, most recently, live migration and HA features in the free version. It also takes up around 100MB of space rather than 300+MB which makes things less tight on the CF cards.

So, nothing is perfect - it's just which annoyances you have to put up with.