[gtaSAGE-members] VMware ESX server

[Fraser Campbell]

Hi,

Does anyone here have much experience with running Linux (especially
SuSE) under VMware's ESX server?  I would prefer to hear the horror
stories that I suspect are out there but if you've had positive
experiences that's good as well ;-)

We have had less than heart-warming experiences, some issues:

- crashes, poof VM gone ... logs, what logs???
- network outages (removed a secondary IP from NIC and whole interface
  stopped responding)
- unstable clock, usually slow, sometimes fast ... too eratic for ntp
  to solve
- awful performance/overhead

We have less than 20 Linux virtual machines at the moment but the push
is on to virtualize for new projects so the number will grow
substantially.  My feeling is that VMware is definitely not the way to
go but it's hard to combat the marketing machine.

I have been benchmarking Xen versus ESX and all I can say is that Xen
makes ESX look silly in all tests to date.

Thanks,
Fraser