My $0.02 on virtualization products... I haven't done scientific tests or ran all the products in production for a long time, but I've been exploring the options. The free VMWare server works and supports a hell of a lot of different guest OSs, but I think it lacks one of the major selling points of going virtual: live migration to another box. ESX has this, but it costs a ton. Plain open-source Xen can't do this and can't run a lot of OSs reliably (I've got some NT4 stuuf I need to get off aging machines). I wasn't too impressed with what Xen Source Enterprise added, but VirtualIron looked really good and it's cheap. MS Virtual Server runs really well, and with the stuff currently in beta it can migrate between hosts. On the horizon with MS is Longhorn which if you believe the hype will compete with ESX server pretty well.
I work for a small company and have a small budget, so I'm doing my virtualization in bits and pieces with time I don't have... so to just have stuff run, I have a few VMs in MS Virtual Server using direct attached storage. I tried OF for a couple of days of performance tests, and it had mysterious slow downs. I didn't have the time to figure it out, but now I'm thinking that a shared SAS array might be a better choice for me since I can't see growing past 4 hosts accessing the array (at least in the time I expect to be working here). I might still use iSCSI for replication of some data to a remote site, so that's what I'm looking at OF for now. Anyone running it over a WAN? -- Chris _______________________________________________ Openfiler-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openfiler.com/mailman/listinfo/openfiler-users
