Free virtual machine, but which?

Bleek

Bleek

Bleek

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Another day, another question. :D

We've quite a lot of satellite IBM x226 servers that don't support Windows 2008, my idea was to virtualise them via VM or MSoft VS 2005 and slap 2008 on as virtual.

The question is which is the best solution, VMware or Microsoft, I'm talking about the FREE variants of both here as the platform will be running just one server OS on one physical server.

Are they both easily remote manageable?
 
If the server will support ESXi I'd go down that route. Since it's bare metal it should be more efficient and more robust then using VS 2005.

If not I'd personaly still go for VMWare Server, but I am a terrible VMWare hore.
 
Aren't there license requirements for VMware though i.e. management license?

Or does it consider each install as a freebie and as they're seperate servers they only each use 1 license so it's not an issue? These will be 40+ seperate physical boxes, each with their own instance of VM and a single 2008 OS.
 
Bleek said:
Aren't there license requirements for VMware though i.e. management license?

Or does it consider each install as a freebie and as they're seperate servers they only each use 1 license so it's not an issue? These will be 40+ seperate physical boxes, each with their own instance of VM and a single 2008 OS.
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Correct. if they are all going to be standalone nodes then that's fine.
 
But can we centrally managethem all via 'one' console i.e. can we link all the Hyper-V VM's to one central management box or is there a better solution?
 
Bleek said:
But can we centrally managethem all via 'one' console i.e. can we link all the Hyper-V VM's to one central management box or is there a better solution?
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You can, but for any more than a few boxen you'll probably want to buy System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Otherwise I would imagine it'd be very frustrating to manage.
 
Saundie said:
You can, but for any more than a few boxen you'll probably want to buy System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Otherwise I would imagine it'd be very frustrating to manage.
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Yeah agreed, Virtual Infrastructure Client does the job of managing an ESX server very well with multiple machines.

For multiple hosts it does work, as you can fire up the program multiple times and have each one connected to different hosts, which is what we did here for a while.

After a while my boss couldn't take the ballache and ordered vCentre which does a great job of managing multiple hosts and machines.

OP, if it were me I'd also go with VMware ESXi if possible. I've used both and now we have fully migrated to multiple ESXi hosts. No sign of HyperV, in comparison its very bloated.
 
ESXi if you can stand the de-centralised management, vCenter isn't free (or whatever the hell they call it these days, ive not bothered updating myself on the v4 stuff yet)

XenServer is a more complete free package and will likely be just as up to the job required.
 
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