Any reasons to abandon the free VMware Server?

michalrz

michalrz

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Hello everyone,

I used to play around with VMWare server a bit, somewhere around version 2, anyway I remember the transition to that web based UI.
Apparently now only the Player edition is free... right?
Server had a lot of neat features like VMs autostart and CLI control, which I fail to find in the Player edition.
I know there's the free esxi, but it seems strict as to what hardware it supports. I'd run it on regular hardware, probably on Debian.
I simply would like to utilize features like snapshots and starting/stopping via the CLI. Can't find those in Player (I might be very well missing something obvious).
As you've probably noticed by now, I am incredibly cheap :D. I work for a very small social welfare institution (20 desktops, a windows server, a linux server, a few laptops, and chump change for a budget) and would love to apply my experience with Vmware server to aid potential disaster recovery and/or hardware sharing (raid cards and such).
So, any reason NOT to (legally) use VMWare Server?

I'd virtualize Linux 2.6 based systems and maybe Windows 2003 or 2008 server, possibly windows 7.
 
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Keep in mind the HCL for ESXi is really picky, but in all likelihood, any non-crap HW that supports vt-x or some such would probably work, they just won't support it. Then again, if you're running the free version, you get no support anyway :)
 
Thanks for the speedy answer.
Yes I was a bit intimidated by that HCL list, things seemed much simpler with the older VMWare server.
The faq at http://www.vmware.com/products/server/faqs.html states that it will remain legal and all, but I'd like to know what caveats I'd bump into while using it for newer guest systems (like Windows 7, or newer Linux kernels).
ESXi is I guess beyond the scope of my question here... although I do realize migrating to it would render my question moot...
 
Remember, ESXi is bare metal, Server is a hosted product.

ESXi is the future - Server is EOL. Give ESXi a try :)
 
I'd say give ESXi a try. Being that you're familiar with Server, you'll have a basic understanding of ESXi right off the bat and will be able to get in and start learning pretty quickly.
Player and Workstation I think aren't as beneficial, but it's hard to say without knowing what you actually plan on doing with the environment.
 
Make sure to install ESXi onto a thumbdrive / SD card or something along those lines. Liberate that storage!
 
lopoetve said:
Remember, ESXi is bare metal, Server is a hosted product.

ESXi is the future - Server is EOL. Give ESXi a try :)
Click to expand...

I will, since you asked so nicely :D IIRC I tried Xenserver but experienced some incompatibilities. The kernel was spewing some nasty errors about not being able to allocate memory and didn't elevate to GUI.

Eulogy said:
I'd say give ESXi a try. Being that you're familiar with
Player and Workstation I think aren't as beneficial, but it's hard to say without knowing what you actually plan on doing with the environment.
Click to expand...
No PCI passthrough or nothing like that, just a beefier desktop computer promoted to being a VM host for a bunch (2-3) lightly loaded (10 users?) LAMP/ Firebird/ postfix servers. Hell, I considered the older Vmware Server because that way I could get away with simply using a Linux install with mdadm raid - yes, we're that poor ;)
Virtualization would simply let me do 3 things I need:
- separate my LAMP server from my Firebird server and from a mailserver running Groupoffice (total of 3 VMs)
- test updates before rolling them into production
- easily backup whole VMs for deployment in case of trouble
- I'll be probably able to talk my boss into one serious HW upgrade for this, so would like to share those parts among virtual servers. I need less than a TB of storage for the whole shebang

If ESXi works on the hardware I have, and will be capable of autostarting VMs and Snapshots then I'd be golden (I think).

illogitech said:
Make sure to install ESXi onto a thumbdrive / SD card or something along those lines. Liberate that storage!
Click to expand...
Check! :)

Draugauth said:
The problem with ESXi finding drivers that aren't on HCL
Click to expand...

Exactly my fears. I will be forced to use consumer level hardware.

I realize this all is far from what you guys usually do, but I'm basically trying to make do with what I can, and to put things into perspective - only 6 out of 20 computers use Windows 7, rest are on XP, and around 13 machines out of ~20 are somewhere in the Prescott core era.

Thanks for your opinions though, nice to hear from pros.
 
lopoetve said:
Anything halfway-decent server wise will get the job done these days.
Click to expand...

ESXi doesn't support Highpoint Raid controllers anymore. So that statement is not exactly true.

Granted you can find servers on ebay for sell pretty cheap that will run ESXi and are fully supported.
 
Draugauth said:
ESXi doesn't support Highpoint Raid controllers anymore. So that statement is not exactly true.

Granted you can find servers on ebay for sell pretty cheap that will run ESXi and are fully supported.
Click to expand...

Given that I'm running it on 2 precision workstations, a shuttle, and 7 Dell D630 laptops for a dev cluster... ;)
 
One of my buddies is using this kind of setup

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=16622.0

with a different mini-itx mobo (foxconn h67s) that has the nic (RTL8111E) that just works out of box (esxi 5.x)... bout 500/node has multiple nodes... makes a great lab setup...

personally im holding out til they make a 32gb model config 2x16GB dimms in mini-itx on the intel end then im all in...

Still cheap/fun/small/power saving...
 
Draugauth said:
ESXi doesn't support Highpoint Raid controllers anymore. So that statement is not exactly true.

Granted you can find servers on ebay for sell pretty cheap that will run ESXi and are fully supported.
Click to expand...

good, they are crap anyways :) :)
 
I used to run the VMware server on Linux, and it was annoying. Anytime you updated the host system, you had to go through a bunch of crap to get it working again (compiles which didn't work, etc.) Years ago I switched to ESXi 4.1, and then 5.0, and now I'm on 5.1.

It's free, and runs up to 32 GB of RAM (ESXi 4.1 ran up to 256 GB... don't get us started). It's much nicer than Server, since it's a self-contained bare-metal hypervisor. It's easy to update, maintain, etc. Install it on a USB flash drive (2 GB will do it) and it's super easy to deal with.

My personal preference is to run it on Desktop hardware. It's cheaper, a lot quieter, and as long as your careful about VT-d/VT-x and DIMM slots (get at least 4).

I'm not a big fan of RAID cards, since they're not a form of backup (some assume that they are) and RAID performance for spinning rust is no where near a decent self-garbage collecting SSD. My two ESXi hosts have large terabyte drives for regular storage, and SSDs for boot partitions and databases that need to be super fast.

You lose some reliability/featuers, such as ECC RAM, IPMI, and generally you get a better build quality with server-oriented hardware, but for my uses that's not a big deal.
 
michalrz said:
Hello everyone,

I used to play around with VMWare server a bit, somewhere around version 2, anyway I remember the transition to that web based UI.
Apparently now only the Player edition is free... right?
Server had a lot of neat features like VMs autostart and CLI control, which I fail to find in the Player edition.
I know there's the free esxi, but it seems strict as to what hardware it supports. I'd run it on regular hardware, probably on Debian.
I simply would like to utilize features like snapshots and starting/stopping via the CLI. Can't find those in Player (I might be very well missing something obvious).
Click to expand...

Why not use KVM? It should fit you requirements. Granted you are familiar with Linux.
It has CLI as well as UI.
 
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