I went our for a very nice meal with my friend Kevin Cade last night - he's in town on a training course at IBM on the South Bank covering VMWare's new server product line;VMware ESX Server is quite different from the other VMware products - which all run on top of either Windows or Linux - as it has its own proprietary kernel and is installed directly on the bare metal. This approach provides better control and granularity on allocating resources to Virtual Machines, and also increases security, thus positioning VMware ESX as an enterprise-grade product.
ESX is VMware's flagship product and has been rapidly adopted by companies who are looking to consolidate their servers. Two other products are used in conjunction with ESX - Virtual Center and VMotion. Virtual Center allows monitoring and management of multiple ESX or GSX servers. VMotion allows moving virtual machines between servers on the fly, with zero downtime.
He's very excited by this - apparently you can migrate a server image between boxes with zero downtime! Which seems incredible! Because they have rolled their own kernal (based on 2.4 Linux) it runs very tight and the typical performance hit for running the emulated environment is in the order of 20% - but this decreases as you host multiple servers on the same hardware due to some very clever transparent memory sharing arrangements. I'm running the baby version of VMWare on my laptop so I can have a mixed Windows/Ubuntu environment and I've been impressed - the virtual NAT router that sits between Linux and the Windows network drivers is a joy to behold!
Kevin also does the First Person Show podcast (link in the RH bar) and he was interviewing my friend Victoria for episode 14. After tea we wandered along the embankment chatting - he has three boys (like me) and it was a splendid evening!
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