VMWare has been producing virtualized environments for a long time – longer than most people realize. At ORCS Web we ran VMWare ESX Server (the version that runs “on the hardware” rather than GSX Server which ran on top of a host OS) back in the 1.x days.
Performance was actually pretty good even back then. Not as good as current versions, but they did a good job on this point.
Management was not great though. In fact, it was a hassle. I actually had to purchase a Linux For Dummies book because their management tools were lacking and far too many operations had to be performed using the command-line and Linux-ish commands. This was a major drawback at the time.
Stability and resource management were not great either. It was too easy for a guest “machine” to impact other machines. It seemed that we were constantly tweaking the settings to protect the overall solution from problems. There was also a fairly common problem of “threads hanging” which would cause a virtualized machine to totally freeze – a problem only solved by using the command line to track down the thread and kill it so the virtual machine could be restarted.
Between the management, resource, and stability issues, we had to scrap the product after less than a year of running it.
That was then; this is now.
VMWare has made huge improvements since the 1.x days. They are now supporting version 3.5 of the Server product and it is very impressive.
Not only has the ESX Server product been improved, but they have built an entire suite of products to enhance the usability, stability, availability, etc… of their offering. This suite is named Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3) and includes things like migration of live running guests from one physical server to another. Yes – “live running’ guests. I doubted this at first but testing this migration with continuous pings and other tests confirm that it does need migrate live with only the slightest interruption, of perhaps a second, which is often not noticeable. They call this feature VMotion.
Another really cool improvement, built upon VMotion, is dynamic resource allocating. For a solution with multiple VMWare servers, the suite will continuously monitor resources and actually move guests as needed (live, with no interruption) from one physical machine to another to balance resources and provide the best performance for all the guests on the cluster. It’s really cool.
There are other enhancements in VI3 like integrated backup solutions, security solutions, provisioning improvements, etc…
It has come a long way since the 1.x days and is now finally ready for critical production systems – in addition to the smaller and development systems that were commonly run on it in the past.
Do you use VI3? I’d love to hear your thoughts on it below.
Happy Hosting
~Brad