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From: Phil Latio on 17 Feb 2007 03:30
A local hosting this week were "giving away" some of their old equipment on
the proviso you made a donation to their chosen charity so I went along and
grabbed an oldish U1 rack mountable server case. Not knowing the company
even existed despite being local to me, I had a chat with them and found out
their core business is the virtual server market. Being a rather nosey
though somewhat uneducated individual, I have since been looking at this
particular market and discovered the VMWare website to investigate exactly
how this virtual server thingy works.

There seems to be a number of very similar products including a free one
called VMware Server http://www.vmware.com/products/server/features.html so
I am curious to which product they and other companies offering virtual
servers are using? This free one on reading some of the documentation
appears to have all the functionality required to run virtual servers though
perhaps I have not understood this technology correctly.

Cheers

Phil






From: Ian Rawlings on 17 Feb 2007 03:39
On 2007-02-17, Phil Latio <phil.latio(a)f-in-stupid.co.uk> wrote:

> I am curious to which product they and other companies offering virtual
> servers are using? This free one on reading some of the documentation
> appears to have all the functionality required to run virtual servers though
> perhaps I have not understood this technology correctly.

VMWare Server is enough but lacks some features that make management
easier, for example multiple snapshots and virtual server migration.
VMWare workstation offers multiple snapshots, vmware player just
allows you to run pre-made images (so someone can make images with
vmware workstation then distribute them with vmware player). A
virtual server ISP would most likely use ESX server.

--
Blast off and strike the evil Bydo empire!
From: 7 on 17 Feb 2007 15:23
Phil Latio wrote:

> A local hosting this week were "giving away" some of their old equipment
> on the proviso you made a donation to their chosen charity so I went along
> and grabbed an oldish U1 rack mountable server case. Not knowing the
> company even existed despite being local to me, I had a chat with them and
> found out their core business is the virtual server market. Being a rather
> nosey though somewhat uneducated individual, I have since been looking at
> this particular market and discovered the VMWare website to investigate
> exactly how this virtual server thingy works.
>
> There seems to be a number of very similar products including a free one
> called VMware Server http://www.vmware.com/products/server/features.html
> so I am curious to which product they and other companies offering virtual
> servers are using? This free one on reading some of the documentation
> appears to have all the functionality required to run virtual servers
> though perhaps I have not understood this technology correctly.


There is also Knoppix 5.1 and Qemu running under Linux.
It runs older versions of windopz and a lot of versions of Linux
in a box without any hassle. Just create a blank say 4Gb file,
run qemu with blank file's name and iso filename of an install CD, then
it boots like a real computer and installs the CD to the blank file
which it treats as a hard disk. You can back up the file to
DVD and restore. If you say installed windopz, then you can max
out the screen with qemu and not tell much difference
with the real thing. Of course, if it get infected with viri,
then you can just scrub that 4gb file and start with saved file.


From: Ewan Mac Mahon on 19 Feb 2007 08:12
(this might come as a near duplicate; slight finger trouble earlier - soory
if it does)

On Saturday, 17 February, Phil Latio wrote:
> A local hosting this week were "giving away" some of their old equipment on
> the proviso you made a donation to their chosen charity so I went along and
> grabbed an oldish U1 rack mountable server case.

>
> There seems to be a number of very similar products including a free one
> called VMware Server http://www.vmware.com/products/server/features.html so
> I am curious to which product they and other companies offering virtual
> servers are using?

If you mean Bytemark they don't use VMware at all, they use UserMode
Linux[1][2], which is a so-called paravirtualised system wherein the guests
are aware that they're virtual, whereas VMware does full virtualisaton,
where the guests think they're running on real hardware.

UML is Free software, and is now a part of the standard linux kernel,
VMware is proprietary. There's a fair bit of information about the various
Free linux virtualisation systems on <http://virt.kernelnewbies.org/>. I
think it's safe to say that VMware is hard to beat for simplicity, but for
more complicated jobs it has the annoying tendency common to a lot of
proprietary software of doing things its own way, and if it's not what you
want, it's difficult or impossible to change it.


Ewan


[1] <http://www.bytemark.co.uk/page/Live/hosting/virtualmachine/>
[2] <http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/>
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