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The latest iteration of VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure, the server virtualization platform comprising ESX Server 3.5 and Virtual-Center 2.5, boasts a set of hardware support enhancements, scalability improvements and new automation provisions that stand to enforce the popularity of VMware’s already market-leading virtualization offering.
VMware has taken impressive steps toward broadening the range of equipment that ESX Server is capable of embracing into companies’ enterprise virtualization infrastructures, adding support, for instance, for the TSO (TCP Segmentation Offload) capabilities of certain network adapters and for SATA (Serial ATA) drives as local host storage.
What’s more, VirtualCenter 2.5 now sports a Consolidation feature that’s intended to help small and midsize businesses move workloads from physical systems that use a Windows operating system to virtual machines.
In eWeek Labs’ tests of the ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 duo, which began shipping in December, we were able to use the product’s new Consolidation feature to identify, analyze and eventually migrate physical machines to virtual instances. However, the Consolidation tool hasn’t yet reached the sort of polished operation that we’re accustomed to seeing from VMware.
In addition, we were disappointed to find that VMware’s operating system support for its Virtual Infrastructure client software has continued to shrink. When we reviewed VMware’s VI3 last year, we were annoyed to find that VI3 administration (apart from a feature-incomplete Web interface) was a Windows-only affair. This time around, VMware has slipped further backward by axing-at least temporarily-support for 64-bit versions of Windows. According to a post we found on one of VMware’s message boards, a fix for the 64-bit Windows issue is on tap for some time in the second half of this year.
Shrinking client support aside, VMware Virtual Infrastructure is an excellent server virtualization product, which offers organizations a solid foundation on which to realize their high-utilization, high-availability server infrastructure goals.
Based on the current virtualization product landscape, you’re unlikely to get fired for buying VMware, but there’s no shortage of competing products for the administrator looking to virtualize his or her x86- or x86-64-based infrastructure. Before committing to VMware’s wares, we suggest that you investigate the crop of Xen-based offerings from Citrix Systems, Virtual Iron and 3Tera, as well as from operating system vendors such as Red Hat and Novell. In addition, Sun Microsystems has its own Xen-centered solution on the way in the form of xVM, and we’ve been impressed with the still-beta Hyper-V technology that Microsoft has begun shipping alongside Windows Server 2008.
VMware sells its Virtual Infrastructure product package in three different editions. VI3 Foundation (previously known as Starter) costs $1,000 per pair of CPU sockets and comes with a Virtual-Center license, Consolidated Backup functionality and VMware’s new Update Manager utility.
VI3 Standard Edition adds support for automatic migration of VMs between nodes in case of host failure and costs about $3,000 per CPU socket pair.
VI3 Enterprise Edition costs $5,750 per pair of CPU sockets and adds support for VMotion live migration, VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler and VMware’s new Storage VMotion functionality.
VMware is also making its hypervisor available in a hardware-integrated edition that ships with particular server machines. This new version, which VMware calls ESX Server 3i, has not yet begun shipping on OEM machines, but we look forward to testing it once it does.
We conducted the bulk of our testing on a pair of IBM eServer 325 servers, each of which was outfitted with dual 1,595MHz Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processors and 2GB of RAM. One of the IBM servers on which we tested had been running ESX Server 3.0.1, and we were able to update this server to ESX Version 3.5 without a hitch. On the second server, we installed ESX from scratch.
For shared storage-a must considering that our eServers lacked SCSI drives-we turned to the same sort of home-brewed iSCSI SAN that powered our tests of VI3 last year. As in those tests, our iSCSI box-based on the open-source OpenFiler Project-served us well enough to put ESX Server 3.5 through its paces and to host an assortment of Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003 and 2008 VMs, as well as a group of Debian GNU/Linux and rPath software appliances.
Consolidation
The new consolidation feature in VirtualCenter 2.5 analyzes physical computers in a domain or workgroup and then provides ratings about the suitability of the system for migration to a VM. The interface stepped us through selecting the physical computers to analyze and provided us with results including a one-to-five star confidence rating that the analysis is correct, a consolidation plan that suggested ESX Server destinations for the new VM and a task pane that shows that progress of the migration process.
To use the Consolidation tool, we first had to use the Microsoft Management Console on the system running Microsoft Virtual Server to enable the local administrator account to be able to log in as a service. We have used network and system management tools that need this type of configuration-Microsoft’s Active Directory Application Module, for example. It is a rather heavy-handed way to enable the Consolidation tool, but it ensured that the process was able to run when accessing VirtualCenter 2.5 from the Infrastructure Client.
During our tests, the consolidation process-which only works with Windows systems-was more than a little rough. It wasn’t uncommon during testing for the Consolidation tool to list a physical server in active analysis phase while also having a consolidation plan ready. Several attempts to migrate physical servers running Windows 2003 Server ended with “unknown error encountered” messages. We also had problems with domain information being cached in VirtualCenter 2.5 and not updating when new physical systems were added to the network.
We experienced much smoother sailing with the product’s new data store browser, to which VMware has added support for uploading files or folders from your client machine to an available data store. We were also able to use the overhauled data store browser to download files or folders to the machine on which we were running the Virtual Infrastructure client, or to shuttle this data between the different data stores that were accessible to our VirtualCenter 2.5 installation.
This feature can really come in handy for ferrying ISO images from wherever you’ve downloaded them to where they need to be for your VMs to access and use them. With the previous version of ESX Server, we were accustomed to uploading images onto an FTP server in the lab to which we had provided ESX access via NFS (Network File System).
We were also impressed by the new support in VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler for making, and, if we so chose, automatically implementing power management suggestions based on the active workloads on my cluster. For this release, VMware has labeled this new power management functionality as “experimental”-you want to make sure that VirtualCenter 2.5 can successfully put to sleep and awaken your ESX nodes before you leave it to right-size power consumption on its own. In our tests, this feature worked without a hitch.
Cameron Sturdevant contributed to this article.