toeringsandthong:

why would you be a retard and type everything in a color that screws up your eyes? i didnt even read it pass the 2nd sentence ! dont be a retard next time and type it in NORMAL colors you jackass !

y u mad tho?

we are considering to buy a VMware Virtual Center.
We have two servers running VMware Standard edition.
Do you believe it will be worth it? Or do we have to
upgrade our VMware licenses to Enterprise before upgrading
virtual center to make it worth it. I had just read the
following article
VMware virtual center real value

http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/05/16/1940214&from=rss

I suggest you browse the VMWare Virtual Appliance Directory.

There are a lot of great toys to play with. It will give you better ideas on how you can use it.

In the ‘Joe Schmoe’ world, start with installing a Linux distro in it and play with that. I’m even told there is an OSX VM out there on some torrent site. My brother claims to have found it but I have not.

Try new OS’ like when Vista was in Beta and Alpha you could put it in a VM and play with it. Test new versions of your applications. Do dry runs of server installs, or application installs to make sure it installs right and works.

That is how I got into it. Then I moved it into production here and have about 5 or 6 VMs running right now, from demo/beta stuff to production environments like my antispam gateway I updated on Friday.

Just think of it this way…anything you want to do or test you can do it in a VM provided you have the hardware resources at your disposal.

You can play with it using the Player which is free. Player allows you to use VMWare prebuilt appliances and virtual machines.

There is also the Server product, which used to be their GSX server. You can build virtual machines and use them in production or whatever. This too is free, but they make you register and get a serial number to use it.

From there, there is Workstation. Workstation allows you to create VMs and use them. It is similar to Server, but does have more tools. Last I checked it was $200 @ CDW.

Then there is their ACE program for Virtual Desktops Environments…..don’t know too terribly much about this product.

Finally, there is their ESX server with Virtual Center. This runs $1500/per CPU socket. ESX is the production class, server product. It is Red Hat Enterprise 3 based product and installs straight on to the iron as a native OS where the VMs run in the Hypervisor.

Virtual Center allows you to manage Server and ESX clients through a console.

But back to the main question….What is VMWare and what does it do?

VMWare creates a layer between the hardware and the OS. Not unlike the HAL in NT4 days. But what it really does is it creates an environment of generic hardware to allow you to run an OS on a ‘stable’ system that is hardware agnostic(sort of….) and you can move it around to just about any system that has the resources available.

When using VMWare products you have to look at hardware(RAM, disc, processor clock units) as commodity products where you only have X number available and you need to work within those parameters.

But by separating the OS from the hardware underlying it, you no make your servers, or desktop OS’ independent and flexible, as well as you get to allocate what resources you need.

If you check the CPU cycles on any machine, be it laptop/desktop/server you will see that utilization hovers around 10% max….the rest is wasted. Grid computing solves this by utilizing idle cycles, but with VMWare you can allocate them in advance and guarantee the resources when needed. ESX with Virtual Center takes this to the Nth degree, but that is for a different discussion.

What Karl mentioned is how VMWare on the desktop is mostly used…as a place to test patches, viruses, and development of new apps. It creates a stable, secure environment where you can feel free to break the OS as much as you want and there is no harm nor foul because you simply roll back to the snapshot(available in Virtual Center, Server and Workstation) and you’re back to square one.

In essence VMWare allows you to run whatever you want, where you want irrespective of what is lying underneath the WMWare kernel or Hypervisor.

I know I was all over the joint on that one and maybe it helped, maybe not. If you want more clarification, please post and I will try to get more to the point!