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!!

I wish I was there instead of buried under 13.5 inches of snow here.

We miss you guys!