[gtaSAGE-members] VMware ESX server

[fraser at wehave.net]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2005 at 02:27:31AM -0400, Robert Brockway wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Jul 2005, Fraser Campbell wrote:
> 
> > 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
> 
> Wow that does not paint a good picture.

No, pretty pictures don't jump to mind ;-)  Still, I've hunted the
Internet and there is a dearth of VMware sucks type pages, the only
commentary I've seen is of the cool, neato variety.

> All you can do in this case is put your objections in writing backed up 
> with examples of failures in your environment (including dates, impact, 
> etc) and submit a report indicating that in your professional opinion the 
> use of ESX may have serious business impact in the future.

I will certainly do that, VMware still has some time to turn things
around but if we started mass rollouts today it would be a no-go in my
opinion.  If they manage to work out the issues then I can work with it,
even though I still feel it's the wrong product.

> > I have been benchmarking Xen versus ESX and all I can say is that Xen
> > makes ESX look silly in all tests to date.
> 
> You could suggest it as an alternative.

The good press Xen has been getting and industry backing certainly helps,
management is very much aware of it and somewhat open to the idea.  My
guess is that Xen will be built into most server hardware within a few
years.  My early testing indicates that it's ready now and I see no reason
to endure several years of pain with ESX ...

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser at wehave.net>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada                               Debian GNU/Linux