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Disingenuous Cost Comparisons

June 9, 2011 in Virtualizationism | 10 comments

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There are many ways to compare alternatives, but for simplicity, things often come down to cost. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to separate the true comparisons from creative marketing — let’s take a look at some key factors that can help sort the apples from the oranges.

Case Study: The Very Expensive Laptop

Imagine you are looking to buy a new laptop, equipped with various accessories and software. Part of the decision is to select an appropriate office suite to include in the configuration:

There are a number of office suite options: the less capable choice adds $80 to the price, and the one you really need to do your work adds $230 — almost three times the cost. Outrageous! Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: cost, Hyper-V, Microsoft, vSphere

The Secret of Ephemeral Port Groups

May 31, 2011 in Virtualizationism | 6 comments

VMware vSphere networking is available in two variations — Standard vSwitch and Distributed Switch (vDS) — that accommodate a wide range of requirements for any environment. Standard switches are simple to set up and understand, but the effort to manage them scales along with the number of ESXi hosts managed. While that management can certainly be automated, e.g., through PowerCLI, there are advantages to the centrally-configured Distributed Switch.

This is not an article to convince you to use one over the other; to see what experts have to say about the matter, take a look at a recent article from Duncan Epping on whether to go pure Distributed or hybrid.

Whenever this topic comes up for debate, it’s clear that the major concern about vDS is the inability to manage virtual networks if vCenter Server goes down. Thus, the impetus for considering a hybrid environment with management interfaces on Standard vSwitches and only VM networking benefiting from vDS. However, there is a configuration alternative that may just boost confidence in a pure vDS network.

Distributed Switch Port Group Bindings

Distributed Switches, just like Standard vSwitches, use port groups to configure various network capabilities, VLANs, etc. One difference is that vDS port groups have three different binding options: static, dynamic, and ephemeral. For an overview of these options, check out KB Article 1010593.

The key point to note is that port groups using ephemeral bindings behave very much like a Standard vSwitch — even with vCenter Server powered off, administrators have the ability to connect directly to an ESXi host and reconfigure VM networking. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: networking, vSphere

NIC Teaming Update: Hyper-V Still Cloudy as Ever

May 26, 2011 in Virtualizationism | 4 comments

To accommodate the performance and reliability demands of today’s workloads, VMware vSphere provides advanced networking capabilities that form a robust foundation for private cloud computing.

Two different vSwitches are provided in vSphere: Standard and Distributed. Both offer NIC teaming for load balancing and fault tolerance, intuitive VLAN support, and Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) for easy lights out datacenter management. Be sure to check out Jason Boche’s great overview of CDP.

vSphere Distributed Switch — Simple Network Management

The Distributed Switch adds advanced networking features to your virtual infrastructure, such as load-based teaming and private VLANs, and offers centralized port group management — eliminating the need to configure vSwitches and port groups individually on each host. vSphere administrators can also choose to go with a hybrid model, maintaining a Standard vSwitch on each host — typically for management — and leveraging a Distributed Switch for virtual machine traffic.

Here you can see a Distributed Switch that spans four ESX hosts, utilizing two physical NICs per host :

By connecting these physical NICs to multiple trunk ports, virtual machines benefit from network redundancy and load balancing while making it trivial to create port groups for any VLAN required. Configurations are instantly propagated across the cluster, boosting efficiency and minimizing human error. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: ESX, Hyper-V, networking, vSphere

Understanding VMware vSphere, ESXi, and Release Cycles

May 24, 2011 in Virtualizationism | 6 comments

Last week during a customer presentation that I delivered, one of the attendees asked a surprising question:

What’s the difference between ESXi and vSphere?

While that’s an easy one for most VCritical readers to answer, there are newcomers that may benefit from a simple overview. If you’re here seeking vSphere understanding, welcome!

VMware vSphere Demystified

VMware vSphere is the industry-leading virtualization platform that consists of two primary products: VMware ESXi and vCenter Server. ESXi is the hypervisor and installs on bare metal hardware. vCenter Server provides centralized management and allows administrators to configure and monitor ESXi hosts, provision virtual machines, storage, networking, and much more. The vSphere Client is a Windows application that acts as a single pane of glass to manage either a standalone ESXi host directly or an entire datacenter though vCenter.

VMware ESX vs. ESXi

VMware ESX was introduced a decade ago and will be discontinued with the upcoming major release. Carrying the torch forward will be ultra-slim VMware ESXi, which has already seen several years of successful production deployments. Both products are bare-metal hypervisors — they install directly onto a server instead of a traditional general purpose operating system — and have the same capabilities, accommodating any licensed feature from Essentials to Enterprise Plus: vMotion, DRS, HA, FT, and more.

The primary difference is that with ESXi the Red Hat Linux service console is gone, leaving just the hypervisor and critical supporting features. By eliminating tons of unnecessary Linux components, ESXi footprint is measured in mere megabytes — not gigabytes like competitors. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: ESXi, Hyper-V, Microsoft, vSphere

vSphere Smokes Competitors in InfoWorld Shoot-Out

April 13, 2011 in Virtualizationism | 12 comments

InfoWorld just published the results of a comprehensive comparison of the four major virtualization platforms. This Virtualization Shoot-Out looked at the latest releases from Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware.

VMware vSphere still trounces the competition. Paul Venezia, who drove this multi-vendor effort, considered many aspects of virtualization technology and concluded:

VMware still has advanced capabilities that the others lack. VMware also offers a level of consistency and polish that the other solutions don’t yet match. The rough edges and quirks in Citrix, Microsoft, and Red Hat aren’t showstoppers, but they demonstrate that these alternatives all have hidden costs to go along with their (potentially) lower price tags.

Here is the scorecard, summarizing the various categories tested: