What virtualization software is your organization using?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Mika Leuck on December 20, 2008 at 11:20am

VMware and Parallels

Permalink Reply by Attila Seress on May 30, 2009 at 8:24am

I've had great luck with vmware and have played around a little with hyper-v. Vmware supports many linux distros while hyper-v only supports redhat and suse so you can factor that into your budget...

garry said:

Right now VMware has the most installations. With Microsoft licensing scheme now clearly defined in virtual environments expect Hyper-V to become a big player as well, they easily beat VMware on price. With that said, VMware still has the most features and is the most mature of all them. If I am an enterprise, VMware is the way I would go. In up front costs Hyper-V is the clear winner. But when taking into account when things go wrong or maintenance I would go with VMware.

For those few that need raw performance Xen is the way to go.

For the Mac I prefer Fusion to Parallels.

Permalink Reply by David Lukas on July 7, 2009 at 10:09am

I am using Xen for a very simple application: I was given two identical servers with 16GB RAM to set up a primary and backup server for an application that only supports 32-bit Linux at the moment. I run the application on a 32-bit Xen DomainU and the back-end PostgreSQL database on the 64-bit Domain0, to try to get some use out of the extra power. I've been looking into OpenVZ as another way to do this, but as long as Xen keeps working I may leave it alone.

I am also replicating the database and DomainU storage to the backup server using DRBD. Using a virtual machine for the application simplifies this, because it never knows it is running on a different physical server, and does not need a new license key in the case of failover. I was thinking of adding something like Heartbeat to handle failover, but I need some time to experiment with it and none of this is my main job...

FWIW, I also use Virtualbox on my Red Hat desktop to play with the Windows 7 RC and to try various new Linux distros, and I use VMware Fusion on my Macbook Pro at home. (Choice of Fusion over Parallels was easy: I was a part-time grad student at the time, and I picked up a free activation code at a VMware recruitment meeting on campus. Of course, if you're that cheap, there's also Virtualbox for Mac now.)

(Is the Atari 2600 emulator on my cell phone on-topic?)

Permalink Reply by Attila Seress on July 7, 2009 at 10:17am

Slick! I hadn't thought of running virtual machines on my phone. I suppose it's possible.

Permalink Reply by Sean Fox on February 28, 2010 at 8:50am

We are using VMware and Hyper-V. As a training company we are getting a lot of interest in Hyper-V - way more than even a month ago.. VMware is by far the biggest in the market but Hyper-V is gaining ground fast. They both work well and are equal as far as administration is concern. VMware can scale further today but how many virtual machines do you really need? I've spoken to some of the largest VMware shops in Hawaii and they are taking a hard took at Hyper-V because of the total cost.

Internally Hyper-V is solid - we've had Zero problems. We constantly spinning up new servers for all of our administration, SQL and SharePoint classes. The stuff just works. As for our production servers, everything is being migrated to Hyper-V. It is scaling well.

Permalink Reply by Attila Seress on February 28, 2010 at 10:56am

I was under the impression that Microsoft is getting everyone on board with Hyper-v with the intent to charge for licensing later. However, that doesn't sound very Microsoft like. They like to include elements into their OS's that their competition charge for. Do you know if MS plans on charging licensing fees for Hyper-v or just on the OS's themselves? How about Linux support? As far as I know, Hyper-v only supports Redhat Enterprise and SuSe while VMWare supports most distros out there. I suppose MS is simply drawing the divide.

Sean Fox said:

We are using VMware and Hyper-V. As a training company we are getting a lot of interest in Hyper-V - way more than even a month ago.. VMware is by far the biggest in the market but Hyper-V is gaining ground fast. They both work well and are equal as far as administration is concern. VMware can scale further today but how many virtual machines do you really need? I've spoken to some of the largest VMware shops in Hawaii and they are taking a hard took at Hyper-V because of the total cost.

Internally Hyper-V is solid - we've had Zero problems. We constantly spinning up new servers for all of our administration, SQL and SharePoint classes. The stuff just works. As for our production servers, everything is being migrated to Hyper-V. It is scaling well.

Permalink Reply by ashley on March 22, 2010 at 1:58pm

It is possible to use Parallels off of your cell phone. Take a look at this link: http://blogs.parallels.com/consumertech/2010/02/the-headless-parall...

Attila Seress said:

Slick! I hadn't thought of running virtual machines on my phone. I suppose it's possible.