VMware ESX Server 4.0 Released…

 

I guess the Oracle-Sun news makes everything else seem pretty small scale, so the launch of VMware ESX Server 4.0 will probably go largely unnoticed.

I’ve used many of the VMware offerings (Workstation, Server, GSX Server, ESX Server, ESXi, Intrastructure etc.) and seen the demos of the advanced features and they are impressive, but I have to keep asking myself, what do the majority of people actually want out of virtualization? The answer always seems to be “basic virtualization”. I love all the management tools and extra features VMware offer, but do I need them at the staggering price they cost? No. Actually, all the functionality I need comes in the VMware ESXi hypervisor product. It’s a free bare-metal hypervisor that does the job and everything else is just bells and whistles. So if I were going the VMware route I would take the free option and use ESXi. 🙂

Of course, there is another option. Without trying to sound like an Oracle fanboy (which I am), I can’t imagine running production virtualization with any product other than Oracle VM. Why? Because it does the job it’s meant to do (bare-metal virtualization) and it’s free. In that sense it is neck-and-neck with VMware ESXi. If you are planning to run Oracle software on your vurtual machines the support issue is much clearer on Oracle VM than ESXi, so the decision is really a no-brainer.

I’m sure there are companies that will need the additional functionality the VMware product set offer, but for many the latest iteration of the VMware products will be feature-creep gone too far. It will be interesting to see how this latest release pans out for them.

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

5 thoughts on “VMware ESX Server 4.0 Released…”

  1. Sun also has xVM in beta. With both being based off of Xen, I find Sun’s management tools and interface much easier to use and more powerful than Oracle’s. I think Oracle can merge the two and also help fill in the gaps.

    The same thing for Identify Management, good synergies there.

    Oracle may change the licensing for OpenSolaris to GNU so that DTrace, ZFS, and the Solaris Kernel and Solaris features can get merged into Linux to create a super OS.

    Java? Enough Said, they will further integrate.

    Acquisitions up for Oracle

    Informatica (They would own the ETL market)
    Citrix (They can then own XEN and get the other Citrix IP).
    and Red Hat! (They would also get JBOSS

  2. Tom: They can’t own a market, anti-trust laws will mess them up.

    Tim: Oracle doesn’t give a damn about the majority of people, their business model is directed at corporate sites. The IS dept I work under is all hot about whatever it is virtualization they got. They had to hire back a netadmin who had left (a good guy) to do it all. The downside for me is I wind up having to deal with problems outside of Oracle on technology I know little about, like when the VM’s get pretzled up on an MS server and half the customer service department goes “the database is locked!” and fend off things like “oh, now we can get these disk drives that propagate every block change, and be ready to instantly bring up DR 500 miles away, instead of that standby db stuff.” Can you say ORA-600?

    Virtualization; Feh.

  3. How’d you know my at work screen saver message? 😀

    (except computer instead of keyboard, and it starts Please.)

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