Four smart new blog posts from VMware

This first one is important, because it illustrates the value of talking to your peers who are existing VMware customers. Are they getting value from VMware? How? As people use VMware longer, they trust the platform more and use features like memory overcommit more. That directly affects ROI.

Memory overcommit, aka the ability of VMware ESX to provision memory to
virtual machines in excess of what is physically available on a host,
has been a topic of discussion in virtualization blogs for quite some
time (e.g., “More on Memory Overcommitment”) and apparently still is (e.g. “VMware vs. Microsoft: Why Memory Overcommitment is Useful in Production and Why Microsoft Denies it” and “Microsoft responds to VMware’s ability to overcommit memory” ). …

2) Of the 57% who answered yes, 87% said they use it in production
and test and development, 2% only in production, 11% only in test/dev

……so much for “nobody uses it in production”

Think
about this in the context of some larger trends in the industry. Next
year, volume servers will ship with 8 cores in a single socket – that
is 16 cores per 2-way server. Very very few applications can truly take
advantage of so many cores. Virtualization is inevitable.

Now
think about whether you want your individual virtualized servers to be
islands unto themselves, or whether you want your IT setup to be
managed at a datacenter level, with an OS that unifies many industry
standard parts.

Think
about whether you want to set up and customize availability and
scalability for every application or whether you want to enable it
through point and click as part of the provisioning process. As
applications get componentized, they will consist of many tiers. The
process for guaranteeing service levels for each tier will be difficult
unless service level guarantees were available in a application/OS
independent way.

Our initial finding is that Hyper-V Server is not “thin”; Hyper-V
Server is still ultimately Windows.  Hyper-V Server appears for the
most part to be just Windows Server Hyper-V with Server Core where all
other Server Core roles (except Hyper-V) have been disabled. Hyper-V
Server has practically the same footprint as Windows Server Hyper-V
with Server Core and is subject to the same patches, updates, attacks.
It also appears to have the same restricting, indirect Windows-based
driver model. In fact, it seems that the only advantage of Hyper-V
Server is that one doesn’t have to buy a Windows Server license in
order to deploy it – that’s it.   Hyper-V Server is not “Windows-less”,
but just “Windows License-less.”

Hyper-V Server also has some
significant limitations that it seems to have inherited from the
Standard Edition of Windows Server 2008. It can only support a maximum
of 4 sockets per host, 32GB of physical memory per host, 31GB of
virtual memory per VM, and requires a rip and replace upgrade to
support features like Microsoft Clustering and Quick Migration. So it
seems that Hyper-V Server is more of a starter kit, meant only for very
basic use cases. In comparison, ESXi is a fully functional, production
ready, enterprise offering. Actually, as 1) Both ESXi and Hyper-V
Server are free and 2)Only free ESXi can easily be upgraded via license
key to a production solution, why would anyone ever use Hyper-V Server?
What’s the advantage?

… oh wait, this is totally the best part

I’m really excited about the VI Toolkit Extensions
as a way for us to make the common problems we see on our forums really
easy to do. Just today, a user wanted to find all files on his
datastores that contain the word "delta" (which can indicate a snapshot
that hasn’t been cleaned up properly). As it turns out, with the
extensions this is just a one-liner.
The art of PowerShell really seems to be the art of the one-liner and
with the extensions there are already a lot of great one-liners you can
use.