“How many people have deployed VMware or Xen or even Microsoft Virtual Server in a real production environment?†That’s the question Cliff Saran’s IT FUD blog asked yesterday. It’s an interesting question to ask an engineer such as myself who specializes in VMware deployments for customers. And while I can’t give out the names of some of my customers, I can tell you that more than a couple of them are using VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 in production environments right now.
Here are some examples of how these customers are using VMware:
- One customer has over 20 dual-processor server blades (older HP p-Class blades, by the way—trying to get them to transition to the newer c-Class blades) running ESX Server 3.0.1 in a big DRS cluster hosting over 120 virtual servers. These virtual servers are application servers, middleware servers, Exchange front-end servers, and Citrix Presentation Servers, to name a few.
- Another customer, still early in their VI3 deployment, has a three-node DRS/HA cluster running a variety of workloads, such as Microsoft Office Project Server and a couple other application servers, on VMware ESX Server.
- One very small customer I have is using Virtual Server to host a few workloads, including a middleware server for a web-based application with an SQL backend.
And these are just the examples that I know about. What about all the other VMware engineers in my company, not to mention all the other VARs with strong VMware practices? And Cliff says that he’s having a hard time finding references? That doesn’t make sense to me.
While I love virtualization (and VMware products in particular), I’ll be the first to admit that virtualization is not the “be all/end all†that some make it out to be. Is it useful in many organizations? Yes, absolutely. Will it fit in every situation? No, it won’t. There will be some situations where virtualization is not the answer. However, those situations are fairly limited, and growing more limited by the day.
What about you? Cliff wants stories of people using VMware in production environments, so let’s give ‘em to him. Tell us about your production VMware environment below in the comments.
Tags: Virtualization, VMware
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We have been using VMWare for a few years now to virtualize our Windows AD Infrastructure. Initially it was GSX 3, we tested Virtual Server Early on and decided it wasn’t as good as the older GSX, we evaluated ESX 2.5.3 (?) and decided to go with it. Just prior to deployment ESX 3 was released and we chose to be on the cutting edge, rather than have to deal with an upgrade. Currently we have a cluster of 3 Production machines (4 Xeons in each) and one Dual Xeon Development machine. We are now running approximately 100 VM’s from BSD, Centos, Windows 2003, Solaris and we love it. It may not be for everyone buut it is certainly for Us.
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We’ve been using ESX for about 2 years now. Started on 2.5.3 and in the last 8 months upgrades to 3.01. I love ESX, we have a cluster of 5 servers 3 dual dual cores with 16GB RAM and 2 dual CPU’s with 12 GB RAM. We run a variety of stuff on our VM”s from our QA environments, we are looking at lab manager for this, to some of our web servers for our custom web apps that have to be up 24/7. We use it for our document management software for producing PDF’s in real time, this actually works great with ESX better than any of us though it would. Man we use it for a variety of other things from project/share point servers, accounting software servers, Blackberry servers. It is for applications that require thier own server but only back end to a SQL or Oracle DB so the app draws very little load. I think ESX is an amazing product.
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I’ve used VMware for several production boxes… and I think you can’t get any more important that the payroll server! While the load is *extremely* low except every 2 weeks for the pay period (and thus a perfect for virtualization), it was a politically charged decision. But it worked. Perfectly.
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We have been using ESX Server at the university I work at and now have around 100 VMs. We are running AD domain controllers, OWA Servers, a profile server, Blackberry Server, Test domain, ADAM, MIIS, PSYNC, and the majority of our PeopleSoft Dev and Prod environments on VMWare and we are loving it. We are currently running all this on 8 IBM Blades in one blade Center and on 2 SAN LUNs. We have purchased 2 more Blade Centers and will be re-couping a lot more LUN space shortly to use for VMs also.
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I installed my first 2 ESX hosts for testing in early December of 2005, by Christmas 2005 I had over 15 production guest machines running. I now have 7 VI3 host with over 70 production guests. They are running email, image processing, SQL, web apps, heavy FTP, just about everything. It is the best decision I have made in my 19 years in IT!!!
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XenSource has many customers running XenEnterprise in production. One of our customers virtualizes live 911 call management on XenEnterprise. Amazon has ~3000 servers running Xen in production. If you use Amazon, you talk to a VM running on Xen. More VMware than Xen in the market, obviously, and pretty clearly only the fringe would use Xen in RHEL or SLES for anything other than RHEL/SLES VMs, but we see a tremendous number of Windows IT Pros virtualizing their worlds on our product, with great success.
Simon -
Any Xen customers out there to back up Simon’s statements? I don’t doubt your statements, Simon, but I’d really love to hear from the trenches.
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You can hear from other customers on the VMware web pages: http://www.vmware.com/customers/. Some great video testimonials there.
I do work for VMware and have been here for over 5 years. I could rattle off at least 8,000 different customers that I’ve helped deploy VMware. Some of the most interesting apps I’ve seen run in VMware:
- 911 call systems in South Florida that have lasted through several Cat 3 and higher hurricanes.
- The secret recipe database for Welch’s (on the customer site)
- Bottling control apps for large softdrink manufacturers
- Kronos (time card app for hourly employees) for companies with over 100,000 hourly employees
- Flight data computers on various NASA equipment
- The back end for a ton of different sites we all visit every day
- Credit card processing systems for about 80% of the gift cards on the market
- Hosted web sites from some of the largest hosters on the planetThe list goes on and on. I wish we could name some of these companies but the larger the company the harder it is to get a public statement. Regardless of that, we did some recent calculations and there’s been enough power saved from machines consolidated onto VMware that we could power all of New England for an entire year.
Keep the customer quotes going. It’s great to hear all of the satisfied customers chiming in.
Mike -
Thank you for openly disclosing your affiliation, Mike, and for sharing some of the deployments you’ve seen.
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I’ve deployed over 35 ESX implementations; 90% of which are for production consolidation efforts. I’ve worked for several fortune 100′s who are ALL using ESX in production. This is a very uninformed statement from somebody on the outside looking in.
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The reason I posed the question was that some of the biggest names in software have licensing and support policies that seem to make it awkward or expensive for anyone to do things like server consolidation with VMWare. Oracle and IBM do not recognise soft partitioning and Microsoft requires users to buy a Premier support contract.
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Cliff,
It’s right to point out the deficiencies that the major software firms have in their licensing and support policies–but it’s also right to point out that they are behind the times. Companies of almost every size are using virtualization in production roles, and these software companies are going to need to adapt or get left behind.
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Cliff -
We’ve been virtualized for over 2 years now. We use VI3 for as much production work as possible (virtualized about 90% of our services. The only application that did not succeed with virtualization was our MySQL servers, on which are deposited about 2 million records/day, with about 200k transactions in addition to that. In that case, the disk IO was simply too high for VMware to manage effectively. Everything else has been running brilliantly.
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