Do you run a virtual machine?

[Matthiasa]

Last time I did would have been like 2007ish. 🙁

 

[Muse]

I have a virtual XP machine on this Win7 Ultimate laptop for when I run Pagemaker 6.5, obviously 16 bit. It's a PITA because the VM runs everything pretty slowly. And Pagemaker doesn't have all of the features, some stuff doesn't work. But I can get stuff done anyway. Keeps me from having to use one of my XP machines. Once a month, maybe.

 

[LiuKangBakinPie]

Yes

 

[Udgnim]

home (Virtual Box), have a XP VM & ubuntu VM

college (VMWare Player), have VMs for Active Directory class, VMs for Exchange 2010 class, and a CentOS VM on an external hard drive

thinking about building a new computer when IB comes out and finding out what kind of VM setup I'll be able to use with the new and old PC

 

[stargazr]

Yes, I have VMWare Workstation. I use some older programs in XP, most others just for testing.

 

[RearAdmiral]

yeah, I have a couple of server 2008 vms, and a couple of windows client vms that I use for school or as a lab environment before I try something at work now and again

You mean you don't test things in production? Newb.

 

[Doppel]

You mean you don't test things in production? Newb.

 

[HydroSqueegee]

none at home, but we run hyper-v here at work with about 100 or so VMs running.

 

[amdhunter]

At work, yeah so I can test stuff out.
At home, nah.

 

[mvbighead]

Run about 50 or so at work using both ESX and HyperV. Still need to upgrade to 5 on ESX, but it can wait.

Also run a few at home, though since moving a few months ago, I haven't taken the time to put the host back online.

 

[mvbighead]

All of our servers at my university run VMs, being cheap FTW.

I dunno that I'd call it being cheap. More like being reasonable.

One thing is that ESX itself is expensive. They could be using HyperV, which is cheaper by most accounts.

I dunno, since migrating half of my work environment to virtual, I'd have to say the difference to the end user is minimal, while the management difference has improved a great deal.

Thing is, at any given time, one dept has a need for this, that, or the other. So you produce a quote to purchase a physical server, buy it at about 10k or more in some cases, and then get to work on installing whatever app they've purchased. Then, 3 months later, they find out that the software doesn't do what they want it to or thought that it would do. So now you're stuck with a 10k dollar server that most IT managers would shy away from re-purposing for something else due to life cycle management and those types of things.

With a VM, you already have your hardware. And you can simply make a backup of it and remove it from production if they ever decide to revisit it. VMs make life very, very easy. And by most accounts, the performance is 95% of the original hardware's performance so long as you don't over utilize the server.

And, in my environment, when you have a dual hex-core server with 64gb of RAM running 15 or so VMs at about 2-4GB a pop, performance tends to be very little of an issue as most of those VMs consume very few CPU cycles.

 

[Chapbass]

Roughly 100 or so at work, about 10 at home. Anything from testing things in linux to playing C&C.

 

[geecee]

I realize this isn't one of the technical forums, but anyone link to a good guide to getting started, and/or have any recommendations on which VM software to use (vmware, virtualbox, etc). TIA.

 

[child of wonder]

I dunno, since migrating half of my work environment to virtual, I'd have to say the difference to the end user is minimal, while the management difference has improved a great deal.

Exactly. The manageability and portability of VMs easily outweighs the small drop in performance. Plus, that drop in performance is only if you're pushing a box at 100%. The vast, vast majority of servers sit there using 15% or less of their resources and are excellent candidates for virtualization.

I set up large VMware environments for clients, including one running 140 VMware hosts and over 2,000 VMs, and they can't imagine how difficult their jobs would be if it was all physical again.

 

[lxskllr]

I realize this isn't one of the technical forums, but anyone link to a good guide to getting started, and/or have any recommendations on which VM software to use (vmware, virtualbox, etc). TIA.

Download VirtualBox, and play around. I like VirtualBox because you don't have to register or anything. If you can install a native O/S, a vm should be easy to figure out by clicking buttons, and playing around. It's really pretty simple.

 

[imagoon]

One thing is that ESX itself is expensive. They could be using HyperV, which is cheaper by most accounts.

You would think so until, like VMWare, you need to actually use HyperV. Then you need to purchase the multi thousands of dollar "Microsoft vCenter" and the CALs.

Everything I have worked up has put ESX and hyperV at the same cost tier to hyperV being slightly more costly [around 5-10% in most setups] and more complex to setup, with less OS support.

 

[bobdole369]

I run xen at home to have a transcoder box for pyTivo, openfiler for shares, a phone server (freePBX distro) and a Mint and Ubuntu desktops. I use vista and 7 vms directly on the MBP for work every day via Virtualbox, though I also have a vmWare Fusion license for that machine I find it too resource happy to run anything else but that one VM and nothing else.

 

[RearAdmiral]

On a serious note. I manage a fully virtualized SAP environment. Managing all those vms is super easy. With the proper tweaks you can run a hilarious amount of vms off of any relatively beefy server. The only issues we run into are burning our wimpy storage arrays into the ground.

P.S. Exporting a vm from Xenserver to VMware products is super fun.

 

[JimmiG]

HP decided to abandon my perfectly functioning scanner and not provide any drivers for Vista or Win7, so I run WinXP inside VirtualBox whenever I need to scan something. USB pass-through is great 🙂

 

[RearAdmiral]

I realize this isn't one of the technical forums, but anyone link to a good guide to getting started, and/or have any recommendations on which VM software to use (vmware, virtualbox, etc). TIA.

Depends on how "easy" you want to make it for yourself and if you have a spare server or computer floating around. VMware and Citrix have free products you can use. I've played with Virtualbox a bit and it seems okay for a home environment. If you want to be awesome you can use straight up open source Xen.

I use Citrix Xenserver the most and like it quite a bit. It is a hypervisor that will require it's own machine as well as a client machine(windows) running xencenter to help you manage it.

 

[mvbighead]

You would think so until, like VMWare, you need to actually use HyperV. Then you need to purchase the multi thousands of dollar "Microsoft vCenter" and the CALs.

Everything I have worked up has put ESX and hyperV at the same cost tier to hyperV being slightly more costly [around 5-10% in most setups] and more complex to setup, with less OS support.

I guess I am not looking at quite that high a level, though I am sure you are right.

In my environment, I manage about 5-6 hosts. As I don't use vCenter, I don't have that expense. With ESX, I think we're at about 3-5k dollars worth of their software in the form of VSphere with 3 hosts and VMotion (no storage migration though).

For HyperV, I can buy an Enterprise license of Server 2008 R2, and then run 4 VMs on one host for "free." As I need Windows licenses anyway, I can have 4 servers running Window Server 2008 R2 Enterprise for the cost of one license. Or, I could buy the data center version of Windows Server and run as many VMs as I want for free. And on the ESX host, if I want 4 Enterprise licenses, I have to pay for each one. So, while Microsoft is giving me a reason to buy into their hypervisor, it is providing me a benefit I don't get with VMWare.

And with Hyper-V Manager, I have a similar type of management console I get with ESX in the form of vSphere.

 

[IronWing]

I use the XP vm in Win 7 to run ArcView.

 

[imagoon]

I guess I am not looking at quite that high a level, though I am sure you are right.

In my environment, I manage about 5-6 hosts. As I don't use vCenter, I don't have that expense. With ESX, I think we're at about 3-5k dollars worth of their software in the form of VSphere with 3 hosts and VMotion (no storage migration though).

For HyperV, I can buy an Enterprise license of Server 2008 R2, and then run 4 VMs on one host for "free." As I need Windows licenses anyway, I can have 4 servers running Window Server 2008 R2 Enterprise for the cost of one license. Or, I could buy the data center version of Windows Server and run as many VMs as I want for free. And on the ESX host, if I want 4 Enterprise licenses, I have to pay for each one. So, while Microsoft is giving me a reason to buy into their hypervisor, it is providing me a benefit I don't get with VMWare.

And with Hyper-V Manager, I have a similar type of management console I get with ESX in the form of vSphere.

ESXi is free also. The MS licensing applies to ESXi. (The 4 Enterprise / unlimited Datacenter thing) [you are not correct that you would need to buy 4 licenses for 4 instances etc] The client you see when you connect to the esxi host is the same one that connects to vCenter.

You are comparing the paid for product of ESXi (vCenter Enterprise) to the free HyperV product. Add on the Enterprise HyperV console and you would be at $3k to just get the app, plus the CALs to add the hyperV servers themselves. Basically the same thing on the VMWare side.

I would also say you are missing out on some the best features of both products when running 6 hosts on the free versions of either.

 

[zebano]

Yes, multiple.

 

[mvbighead]

ESXi is free also. The MS licensing applies to ESXi. (The 4 Enterprise / unlimited Datacenter thing) The client you see when you connect to the esxi host is the same one that connects to vCenter.

You are comparing the paid for product of ESXi (vCenter Enterprise) to the free HyperV product. Add on the Enterprise HyperV console and you would be at $3k to just get the app, plus the CALs to add the hyperV servers themselves. Basically the same thing on the VMWare side.

I would also say you are missing out on some the best features of both products when running 6 hosts on the free versions of either.

Actually, with ESXi, if I want to manage all hosts with one vCenter, I need a license to manage each ESXi box in one console. In other words, on the ESX side, I have 3 paid licenses plus 1 vCenter console that can manage those three licensed hosts. To add an ESXi host, I need another license.

With HyperV, I can have all my hosts in the Hyper-V Manager. No added licensing costs, they're just there.

As for the 4 and unlimited thing, I had to do more digging, but you are absolutely right. Basically it is 1 Physical + 4 Virtual. If on ESX, you don't use the physical but you still get the 4 virtual. This is something I had completed missed. Thanks for the tip!

At this point, I will say that I am still evaluating HyperV. For my smallish environment, it seems to me more than adequate. I can manage ALL of the HyperV hosts in one console at no added cost, whereas ESX would like me to pay to have all the hosts in the same console. While this may seem to be a trivial point, it really makes a world of difference from managing multiple hosts.

Also what features would you be referring to? Storage VMotion? That to me is the one thing I would really like to have, but simply don't have. At present I have live migration from host to host so long as I am not moving storage.