Hardware Geeks

So I was browsing around and found this horrible article detailing the demise of VMWare and how the sky is falling for them. So here’s a little rebuttal on why this article from ComputerWorld is wrong.

Referenced Article from ComputerWorld

First thing that comes to mind when reading your article, have you ever used VMWare in the enterprise space? Were a Microsoft shop, but we use and will continue to use, ESX server by VMWare. Theirs a number of reasons for this, most have to do with Hyper-V having huge gaps in it’s feature set as of 1.0.

HyperV missing functionality making it unusable in anything but small business:
-No hot swap for virtual machines. Thats right, your server goes down, you’re hosed, no VMotion for automated recovery and movement.
-No Hot Plug support for virtual machines. You can’t add most hardware to a virtual machine thats live, memory, storage, cpu pooling, none of it is supported on a live virtual machine. ESX on the other hand, has all of that.
-It only supports 16 logical cores per server. This sounds like a lot today at least. Until you think about how hard were pushing into multi-core, pretty soon you’ll hit that limit in 1 or 2 cpu’s. Yet this is supposed to be future proof and better?

Hyper-V is not enterprise capable. VMWare is.

Next you say as an ‘IT Guy’ all I care about is consolidation of resources on as small a resource pool as possible (i like my wording more than yours), this is not the case. I care about management, recovery and balancing of load so I can have maximum quality of service and can maintain that quality of service even in disaster. Running as many VM’s on the smallest amount of hardware is not in my top reasons for virtualization.

You talk about Xen, but you don’t mention anything it’s actually capable of or usability. I’ve used Xen, we wanted to use it at remote locations because it’s cheap. Xen is not enterprise ready yet, it has potential, a lot more than Hyper-V does at this point, but it’s not quite there yet. Mostly due to management of media. Anyone who’s dived into Xen can probably relate to the pain of setting up your libraries and pools. Once it’s setup it’s great, but it really can not be used without a NAS of some kind attached. It requires a far higher learning curve for new users than VMWare or Hyper-V and is not approachable by the average windows centric “IT Guy”.

VirtualPC has been free in the consumer space for years, I use Parallels/Virtuoso and VMWare Workstation for my development boxes. They’re both payware, they’re both the best you can get.

Xen has promise, not there.
Hyper-V is currently about 5yr’s behind everyone else.

The rest, they’re not real hypervisors they’re not type 1.

Post Tags: software  virtualization  in the cloud 

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