I have been experimenting,designing & implementing VMWare’s ESX,ESXi & Server editions for some major,small & startup companies with real good results.Putting a virtualization or vmware solution in place is a whole different ball game.Its all about careful & meticulous design keeping that various performance requirements,bottlenecks,purpose of the VMs,number of users,available hardware,bandwidth,etc,etc….Execution or deployment is just 15% and whereas design & system planning phase is 85%.That says it all.I know a case of one huge financial institution which screwed up its virtualization project because of hurrying up the design/system planning phase and directly jumping into implementing it.Ultimately it found itself in a huge mess with huge performance issues and blaming it all on VMware,saying it was not yet ready for mainstream.Later some sense dawned on this company and realized it was their incapability and not VMWare’s.Now,they are spending huge amounts on undoing everything,redoing the design and implementation all over again from square#1.

In short,what I am trying to say is either VMware Server or ESX/ESXi,they are all awesome technologies in their own sense.But,if you dont get the design& system planning basics right while putting a Vmware Server or ESX server ,no matter how big or great hardware & resources you have,they are all a huge waste and nothing more than a expensive 10k$ paperweight.

I have been personally running VMware Server 2.0 on CentOS 5.2(Final),patched and updated without any sort of issues,at my home.This has 6gb of RAM,2 x 640GB sata2 drives and a AMD Phenom Quad core CPU.In the Admin world,this machine would be compared to a midlevel gaming pc.But,you will be surprised to know that this is running 11 VMs at this point and all are up & running without any performance issues.6 are linux,2 Solaris 10,1 Vista,1 Windows server 2008 enterprise and all are running 64bit OS,since this physical cpu has AMD-V enabled.I am also running SAP Netweaver 2004s in one of the linux machines and Oracle 10g RAC simulation on 2 of the VMs,10gR2 on Solaris 10.

Coming to the way,I setup the filesystems or drives or CentOS installation.Like, Brian rightly pointed out,I am running a minimal install(although I have GNOME installed)but running it in run level 3 and disabled un-needed services and only 3-4 services are running.I have no onboard hardware raid as this is not a high end pc or entry level server.So,I am using software raid available in Centos and setup the RAID partitions according to my performance or redundancy needs.For example,VMs which can afford to go down even if one of the datastore filesystem(s) goes down,but need speed over redundancy,I chose to use RAID 0 with an EXT2 formatting.For VMs,which need redundancy over speed and cannot afford to be lost for a filesystem corruption or disk crash,I chose to go with RAID1 with EXT3.My SAP and Win 2008 server have their own dedicated datastores/filesystems and I chose speed over redundancy in both their cases as SAP is pretty IO intensive.So,I used RAID 0 with EXT2 with a bigger chunk size on the RAID level & bigger block sizes on the filesystem level.

Moreover,I make sure I allocate all the disk space upfront while I am creating a VM to give it a performance boost and at the same time avoid defragmentation,which indirectly results in inefficient IO seeks & burden on the kernel ultimately affecting end performance which will have a domino effect on all the VMs in that filesystem.Before,I create my first VM,I make sure the kernel & system parameters,swap ,shared mem params are tuned to requirements & to optimal values to reduce the possibilities of any bottlenecks in the first place.In short,better to be PROACTIVE rather than be REACTIVE & regret later.

This is just a tip of the iceberg,this small setup itself can be tuned,designed in multiple ways depending upon your needs and requirements.Its all about understanding the requirements clearly.That’s the first step for a successful vmware solution.And,trust me VMWare Server 1.x/2.x is a peach of a product,especially when you see its capabilities with the right design/hardware and absolutely at no licensing cost.It may be free of licensing costs,but that doesnt mean its inferior or cannot handle production.One shouldnt compare it with ESX/ESXi server,as that a whole different ball game when you really get into it.You will obviously getfor a 15grand a cutting/bleeding edge technology which can run on bare metal hardware with absolutely negligible overhead & footprint.Whereas,VMware server is running on top of a OS as an application.Now,the beauty is,inspite of that with careful but simple design ,one can churn out immense power,performance with it and can peacefully run handful of decent production VMs.So,compare apples to apples and not apples to oranges,which is not totally fair.

In the first place,the very reason vmware server is free with not licensing strings attached is,VMWARE wants people or companies(Big/Small) to have a taste of what it could achieve and the whole objective is to entice the companies to buy the REAL DEAL (ESX Server) once they tasted the power of vmware server.Any company would think,”If a free product like vmware server can give such a good server consolidation ratio & performance,then imagine what ESX could do which was designed from group up keeping performance,availability,resource scheduling & flexibility in mind”….VMware server is just a starting point…..Sky is the limit from there on….

Hope this info has helped you folks!!

Do feel free to email me@(fuseboxvirt@gmail.com) for any queries,suggestions,ideas,assistance in setting up,designing,tuning VMware Server Or ESX at your homes or organizations.Would be glad to assist you.

Thanks.Adios!!

Excellent article. Thank you for sharing.
My experience: DOS 3.2 –> Win2k3, the last 10 years as a server admin at the corporate enterprise level. Beginner in Linux (very green)
My last two engagements were building large ESX farms attached to fiber and IP SANs. I now find myself doing some work for a small company and I have little budget. Thus I’ve built the following:
- Dell PowerEdge R900, 32 Gig RAM, 8x 146 Gig SAS (all RAID 10, single container) purchased through Dell Outlet for under $7K (2K cheaper than a white box and half the cost of a “new” R900)
- Ubuntu 8.04.1 64 Server (free)
- VMware server 1.0.6.9 (free)
Never heard of CentOS until this post.
Here’s my question: Within ESX I can trunk multiple ports and have my VMs run their own IPs (DHCP or static) accross this. Can I do this within VMware Server?

Please reply to my email address as I rarely visit these posting boards.
Your time and effort are greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

David

Can you please point me to an article on how to configure mainframe on vmware ?
My host operating system is windows XP Professional.

I’ve been messing around a lot with vmware server and centos 5.1 over the last few days and I have a problem… Maybe you have ideas about it.

configuration is
host: centos 5.1 64 bits on a dell 1950 (2 cpu with 2 core each)
guest: centos 5.1 64 bits smp (2 vcpu)

The bottom line is that I’m able to get the load average very high inside the guest, but the the load average on the host doesn’t go over 2… any idea why?

The real problem is that performance inside the vm are way lower than it would directly on the host… (like 10 times less work done) And this is not a memory issue.

thanks for any advice.

First, a bit of a disclaimer–I’ve never used Vmware Server on a Windows Host, only Linux ones. So YMMV.

My instant guess based on what you told me is disk latency.

But first of all, if you haven’t already–install the Vmware Server MUI on your machine, and take a look at it. You’ll probably notice that the VM’s that you’ve allocated a full 512 megs to aren’t actually using anything close to that. I very rarely see a VM actually /need/ 512M of RAM allocated. Adjust them accordingly.

Here’s the reason this is important: On Vmware (of any rendition), your single biggest performance hurdle will always be I/O wait on disk operations. But on Vmware Server, tuning your VM’s to allocate approximately the memory they’re actually using allows your Host OS use more of that RAM for disk cache, which is a good thing considering the size of the .vmdk files usually involved.

That would be my initial suggestion–see how your RAM is allocated, and free up what you can back to the Host OS. 1GB free isn’t a whole lot for both Windows and a disk cache.

Additionally, it would be helpful to know the setup on the 2900. If you haven’t already, mirror the drives and use a PERC that has built-in cache on it.

But as far as Vmware Server not being used in production, it’s hogwash. We’ve got 4 years of it under our belt at TLF–and *yet* have had it flake out. But sure, ESX is preferable of course, if you can actually afford it.

I am running VMware Server 1.04 on a Dell Poweredge 2900 box with Win2K3 R2 Standard with 4Gb ram. I have Netware 6.5 with Groupwise7 running on one VM(1Gb mem assigned, SpamTitan on another VM(512Mb), and BES server running on another VM(512Mb).

My users are complaining of latency issues or hangs when opening emails in Outlook 2003. If they use the GW client, the emails open instaneously.

The bosses called in a consultant to look at the setup. He told them the setup of NW and GW is perfect. The only issue he has is with VMware.

He said this:
1)VMware server was never meant to be put in production. He recommends going to ESX.
2)There is not enough memory on the box, that we should add 4 to 8Gb more.

Can Vmware server be put in production? It replaced the GSX product and it WAS made to run in a production environment…

As for the memory, I would have to install the 64bit version of Windows to take advantage of the extra memory…

What are your thoughts or suggestions?

Any input is greatly appreciated. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer. I spoke to 2 people at Vmware- one said yes, it could be run in production. Another said no, to go with ESX.

Thanks,
Rick