Virtualisation – What is it and do I need it?

So Who’s Doing It?

Everyone, all the big hitters including Microsoft, VMware, IBM, Sun and others. In the typical server room you’re more likely to trip over Microsoft or VMware.

For the desktop there’s 2 great solutions I’ve tried, Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, and VMware Workstation. Both run on top of our existing desktop operating system. I used VMware Workstation for a while until Vista became my preferred platform at which point I made the switch to VPC. To be honest there’s not a lot between them but I prefer VPC for development probably because most of my work is using Microsoft tools. In both cases you can create virtual disks that are simple to copy or move around and a reasonable dual core laptop is capable of running my development environments which are a mix of Windows 2003/2008/XP, Visual Studio and SQL Server in several flavours plus a copy of Suse Linux Enterprise. At the minute VPC is free, but VMware Workstation isn’t.

For the server from Microsoft either Virtual Server 2005 if you’re running Windows 2003 as a base platform which I personally wasn’t keen on, or the new HyperV based host using Windows 2008 as a base with no GUI. Watch out for my installation note on HyperV in the next article. HyperV is included with Windows 2008 provided you don’t select the “Without HyperV” option, or you can download it from the Microsoft Download Centre. VMware offer 2 server options, a free version for simple deployments, or their enterprise ESX server which will cost you. ESX Server has a few bells and whistles above the Microsoft HyperV, particularly aimed at slightly larger enterprises or those requiring a little more resilience. VMotion is one of their technologies that allow you to move virtual machines from one physical box to another – even whilst it is running. It’s very impressive to see it in action. Other stuff like ESX ranger makes taking snapshots and backups of whole machines very simple. For me, if you’ve only got 3 or 4 servers go for HyperV, if you have more go for VMware ESX Server – but keep a close eye on Microsoft, they’re catching up fast.

© 2008 Wipeout44.com

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