Virtualization Short Take #7
May 7th, 2008 by slowe
While at VMware Partner Exchange 2008 in San Diego this week, a few virtualization- or VMware-related headlines have popped in and caught my attention:
- Via Eric, I learned that vimsh has morphed into vmware-vim-cmd in version 3.5. Xtravirt’s updated document can be found here.
- Via Duncan, it looks as if a number of patches for ESX/ESXi 3.5 have been released. Time to put Update Manager through its paces…
- As several other bloggers have mentioned, VMware is now discussing in much greater detail the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) certification. I suspect that the BC/DR and VI architectural workshops that are taking place at Partner Exchange this week—which incorporate a fairly intensive review and presentation process—are prepping professionals for the rigors they will have to endure to achieve VCDX. Bring it on!
- Sys-Con Media—which has republished a couple of my articles—published this interesting article from a KVM developer regarding the placement and architecture of I/O and I/O drivers in various virtualization solutions. Of course, he feels that KVM is the best, but that’s not necessarily surprising.
- Author David Davis has published a brief blog entry at SearchVMware.com that summarizes the use of NIC teaming and load balancing with VMware ESX Server. This blog post is particularly useful since it references some of my own content.
In a future post, I’ll probably delve into more detail an interesting and thought-provoking article from DCS titled “Microsoft Unveils GSNW 2.0″. It’s an interesting take on the (possible) repetition of history. In the meantime, I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this article—go read it, then come back here and add your thoughts in the comments below.
Site Tags: ESX, Linux, Virtualization, VMware
Related Site Tags: Windows, Microsoft, ActiveDirectory, Macintosh, NetApp, Apple, CentOS, Interoperability, Kerberos, Solaris, Storage, iSCSI, LDAP, NAS, NFS, ONTAP, OSS, RedHat, Samba, Unix, Xen
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 5:47 pm and is filed under Linux, Virtualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Hello, read the article of GSNW, and I agree with the writer. However I come from a linux/Solaris background, and our VM of choice is XEN (generally speaking). Citrix owns the XEN group now, however the core is still open source, and from what I understand HyperV is based on XEN. I’ve personally used VMWare Server (not ESX) and compared it to XEN just to see, and it’s hard to prove, but there are random slowdowns with VMWare. In XEN I never know it’s a VM, in VMWare, I’m painfully aware. It’s in this frame of thought where I hope M$ chooses the best VM platform out there, and for linux, it’s certainly XEN (imho). Probably I cant configure VMWare perfectly, but the lack of direct drive usage or even bare partitions in VMWare is a major issue to me - that’s just plain aggravating. Ah well, I don’t do that much with XEN either, mostly use LVM for partition mgmt, etc.
thanks for your column, looks like a nice blog in general.
May 14th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Jack,
You’d really want to compare ESX to Xen in order to get a good feel for how the two products compare. In addition, you’ll want to install VMware’s paravirtualized drivers (called VMware Tools), which are comparable to the PV drivers offered by some Xen vendors (Novell, Citrix, and Virtual Iron spring to mind).
I don’t think that Hyper-V is based on Xen, although I do think they share a lot of architectural similarities. Somehow the idea of Microsoft basing their code on an open source project just doesn’t seem to gel….
Anyway, thanks for reading and thanks for the comment!
May 16th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Will definately be interested to see what Vmware’s new certifaction entails (especially as an instructor as well as being a VCP)!
It’s probably done the rounds already, but:
http://invurted.com/hypervisorcomp.pdf
an interesting comparisom of Vmware and Xen.
Great blog, by the way!