Virtualization has become quite the business hot topic (and buzzword too), now days. It offers the promise of server consolidation, ease of management, personal reduction, monetary savings in miscellaneous fields (such as power consumption). Of course, there is always the question of if it actually delivers on any those promises.
I’ve been using VMWare Server for quite some time, and have been pleased with the product overall. Well, up until I tried out version 2.x.
It was quite a disappointment.
First things first, the web interface, it’s rather slow and clunky. It does display more information than you used to get out of VMWare Server 1.x, such as memory usage and CPU usage, but you have to constantly refresh the pages to get more up to date information. There is a somewhat “ajax” feel to the interface in some areas, and in others you can definitely feel the page refreshes. You also have to install a console plugin to even view your VM running, which is major annoying since the installation only works on a select subset of browsers (Firefox and IE basically). The final issue, which is a real killer, with the web interface is the memory usage. Running two VMs, with neither console open, they were taking up their respective amounts of RAM. Meanwhile the web interface was hogging another half gig of ram doing nothing (I was not even on the interface at the time, just checking it via host OS tools). That’s a rather large chunk of overhead for something you shouldn’t have to touch much. The good news is that you can turn off the web interface, if you’re willing to edit some batch files. The bad news is, you then have to buy VMWare vCenter if you want to manage it without the web interface.
Then there are the speed issues. While running an x64 VM, attempting to install Windows Server x64, with the guest being allocated 2GB of RAM and two processor cores, the machine ran inordinately slow. The installation of Windows Server x64 took almost 3 HOURS just to get it far enough along that it would be usable. It was about this point in time that I started to wonder if v2.x of VMWare Server was worth it. Research indicated that others had experienced similar issues with VMWare Server 2.x and multicore installations. After disabling one of the cores it was noticeably faster, but still quite slow. Read, and especially writes, to the virtual disk were noticeable, and patching the operating system took longer than I cared to wait.
The last thing that really made me decide against using VMWare Server 2.x was the feature removal. For instance, you can no longer trivially create a virtual machine that has it’s backing storage being a physical disk. While the virtualization subsystem DOES support this, you have to craft a handmade (or use third party tools) VMDK just to mount it up. At which point the web interface has problems managing the virtual machine, as it’s not designed to deal with such capabilities, and will typically display an error message when attempting to manage other features of that virtual machine. Considering the rather significant performance advantages using actual backing disks can have, and also considering that this was a rather simple feature of VMWare Server 1.x to use… it’s quite annoying to see it vanish.