Sun are on a bit of a spending spree lately, not content with having acquired MySQL recently, now they have splashed out and bought innotek. Innotek are the creators of VirtualBox which would be seen as a competitor to VMwares Workstation line of products.
Perhaps the main point of interest is that VirtualBox is open source whereas VMware is not. However it just goes to show just how important virtualisation has become.
Virtualisation a go go.
In it’s original incarnation this site was runnning on a virtual Windows 2000 server. However since the hardware it was hosted on has been nothing but unreliable, I have moved it over to a Windows 2003 Server. Reliability should be much improved and hopefully I will manage to update this on a more regular basis.
I’m still playing around with themes too so it may take a while to settle on one that I like 
Virtualisation has been the big buzz word over the past two years. Just how big it was to be was demonstrated when, in 2004 EMC Corporation bought the leading virtualisation developer VMware. Since that time VMware have released sucessive generations of their flagship ESX software and released a free version called VMware Server. Despite having the word server in the title, it will work just as well on your P.C.
In the two years since it was first released, VMware server has found a home in many a datacentre (and home P.C) and it was with much interest that I discovered that Server 2 Beta had been released as a free download. So what’s new in version 2? From VMwares own website:
This newer beta version offers the capabilities from before, plus an array of new features—including a broader range of guest operating system support, an intuitive Web-based management interface, and increased memory for greater scalability. With over 3 million downloads worldwide, VMware Server continues to innovate to provide users with a superior introductory experience to virtualization—for Free.
Version 1 was a simple install, once installed you managed your virtual machines using a native application on your chosen host operating system. With server 2 they have bundled in Apache Tomcat and their own web based management interface which is in my opinion an absolute nightmare. Both version 1 and 2 give you options to mount an ISO image as your CD-ROM which makes installing an OS a breeze. At least it was in version 1. You simply browsed to wherever your ISO was stored either on your PC or LAN and click OK. For version 2 you have to add ISO images to a depolyment repository. Even though CIFS (SMB) is an option, try as I might I could not get it to locate the ISO images I use on my Windows Server 2003. As the product is a beta perhaps this is something that they are aware of that will be resolved in the next release.
Another I’m not a fan of the Web based management either. I much preferred the console application that came with version 1. For the current beta you control and view your virtual machines through your web browser. I found this to be very cumbersome and unreliable. Again this may just be because it is in beta stages but I was disappointed to discover that I could not connect to it using the console application from version 1.
I prefer to have my host operating system free from all other unnecessary software and services. Just the host OS and VMware Server and nothing else. With their new web based management they have bloated the memory requirements to 150MB and that’s before you install any virtual machines. This is down to their web app which has been ported as a Java app. I’ve never been a big fan of Java as it is incredibly bloated and slow, V2 seems to display these dubious qualities as well. An admin now has to be familiar with Apache and Apache Tomcat before you can even consider running version 2. If you had a problem with version 1 it could be confined to the application itself but now they have added extra software to the mix.
After deploying V2 for one week and moving my virtual machines over to it, I had to revert to V1. Administration is much more cumbersome and difficult, their new web based management console is (at least for me) nowhere near as intuitive as they would have you believe from their intro which I quoted from above. I was disappointed with their new beta and can’t consider myself migrating to it when it is released as a mature product. I think that the market leader might have shot themselves in the foot with this release.
