VMware

[blahblahblah]

Is there anyone here who has some expirience with OS virtualization? To me, it seems to be a quite impressive thing. Recently, i attended a VMware conference in Copenhagen and saw many possibilities with that.
Cost savings, consolidation, redundancy, etc.. After talkin to the leadership, i already ordered and configured 2 HP ProLiant blade servers running 2 ESX instances connected to fiber SCSI, VirtualCenter console + VMotion feature. We are now on our way to test consolidation of 12 physical W2k3 servers into that environment.

Any ideas, good advices, etc .. are highly appreciated. Is there something to be aware of? Anyone?

[scipio]

A little bit, mainly using VMware to run virtual instances of linux on Windows.

I'm not sure all the pitfalls from server-side, but on the desktop there is a problem with resolution, ie. won't seem to go beyond 1024X768 regardless of native monitor capability. Could be that I'm just stupid but I didn't see a fix for it.

Depends what you want - you mean you going to run VMWare on 12 W2003 servers and run Linux in a virtual environment? When I hear this I think "why not just run Linux?" but then I don't know what you're trying to solve exactly so I could be talking out of my arse.

[tslvrnyc]

I use vmware in my office for dos apps that don't work well on machines with limited dos memory support.

why don't you use a regular thin client for what you're doing?

[blahblahblah]

Well, the general idea is to consolidate as much of the server HW as possible, and still be able to maintain the same (or even better) level of redundancy. As you probably know, ESX server is a kind of hybrid OS comprised of a Red Hat kernel and VMware's own customized code. That is the host OS. On these hosts, we would like to put as much as possible of our server production environment regardless of what OS it is all about. As it looks like today, many people are having a tendency to dedicate an entire server to one small shitty application, and there we are - running a pure web based creation on some expensive hyper threaded / dual cored powerful SMP machine there CPU utilization becomes like 2% or something and with no disk I/O. That seems stupid. With this sollution, on the other side, you really utilize the things that you payed for and even more, you can "cluster" your virtual servers with VMotion, and performance monitoring reports are no problem any more - due to VirtualCenter. But i'm aware of virtualizing some particular types of servers - like huge Oracle or MSSQL databases, Exchange servers and similar.. I simply do not have any experience yet enough on that area..

[rvince]

I also use VMWare when I need to run windows apps (My desktop OS is Linux)