VMware playtime

So I’ve been playing around with VMware’s vSphere and vCenter on our network recently. Before this we were running VMware Server versions 1.0.4 and 2.0.1 - which were/are free but quite old and a little limiting. Add to that, they need to be run on an operating system themselves, like Linux or Windows, which takes up a considerable amount of space and horsepower on the physical server.

vSphere is an incredibly small operating system made just for running virtual machines (VMs). Its small footprint allows the most amount of space for running multiple VMs on a physical server. We’re running the trial version right now which allows you to play with all the features of the full-blown vSphere Enterprise for 60 days. After those days are up, your machines will remain running, but you won’t be able to manage them in any way.

I have two servers running vSphere and one running the vCenter (which could technically be run on a VM itself, on one of the vSphere servers - I might have to migrate it). Some of the cool things I like about all of this are their vMotion and Converter options.

The vSphere Converter is a free offering that you can use to virtualize machines running on your network to VMs on the vSphere server - they can even be existing VMs on older versions of VMware or even Microsoft’s Virtual Server. I’ve used this one a lot to move all my old VMs to the new vSphere standard with minimal downtime. The converter creates the new VM, copies over all the files, sets it up to run efficiently, and syncs any changes made during this process all while the old machine stays on and accessible to your users. Once it’s done, you can tell it to automatically shut off the old host (if it’s a Windows machine) and power on the new VM so downtime is kept very small - some users won’t even notice depending on the server!

vMotion is another feature I’m loving. It allows me to move around where a VM is stored on my network - whether that’s on the physical vSphere server or an iSCSI disk on my large disk array. And it does this all while the machine is running and accessible too! My users don’t know anything is happening to the server while this is going on, which is very cool in my book.

VMware also makes a free version of vSphere called Hypervisor which I’m also trying out. Hypervisor doesn’t offer some of the other features that a full vSphere/vCenter setup will give you like vMotion, but it is a nice small, clean way to make the most of your physical hardware and virtualize as many other machines as you can. If you want to play around with virtualization and have some extra hardware, give it a try.