[gtaSAGE-members] VMware ESX server

[Adrian Chung]

On Thu, Jul 21, 2005 at 08:39:56PM -0400, Fraser Campbell wrote:
> 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

I haven't used ESX server much, but have used GSX server quite a bit.
A couple of versions back there were problems with clock skew, but it
only occurred on GSX on a Linux host, and on recent versions doesn't
seem to be an issue any more.

An older version of GSX server on Windows had problems with networking
too -- if you pushed too much traffic through the virtual machine,
both the host and virtual NICs would just go away until you rebooted.
But this too I haven't seen recently.

Have you contacted the vendor about these issues at all?

> 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.

What's the host platform spec?

--
Adrian Chung (adrian at enfusion-group dot com)
GPG Fingerprint: C620 C8EA 86BA 79CC 384C E7BE A10C 353B 919D 1A17
http://www.enfusion-group.com/~adrian/
  The Professional Series [2005-07-11 19:14:32]