You can think of the VM console like a remote KVM for virtual machines  — similar to HP iLO on a physical machine.  Most of the time there are more efficient network-based remote access techniques like RDP or SSH.  However, there are some circumstances — like network misconfiguration — that absolutely require the use of a remote console.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you were connected to a VM console while it automatically migrated with VMotion to another physical host?  If you are a long-time VMware admin, you would probably expect things to keep on working.  And that is exactly right — the console connection is seamlessly transferred to the new VMware ESX host.  This behavior is especially important when VMware DRS is dynamically moving virtual machines to optimize cluster resources.

Need to check the network settings of a VM?  No problem — you may not even notice if that VM migrates to another host while you are connected.

Here is a quick video of the situation in action:

Does Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 handle this scenario the same way?  Not exactly.

Related posts:

1. Hyper-V Console Disconnects During Live Migration
2. VMotion from physical ESX 4 to virtual ESX 4
3. Dear Red Hat…
4. Awesome performance through VMware DRS

Yet another nice addition to VMware vSphere 4 — making your virtual infrastructure management and monitoring as simple as possible.

Related posts:

1. Awesome performance through VMware DRS
2. Don’t know much about resource pools
3. SCVMM Damage Control
4. VM Resource Management: Hyper-V versus SCVMM

The VMware Performance Team has repeatedly demonstrated how vSphere is the superior platform for your production workloads.  Check out the latest article on the VROOM! blog for all the details.

By running substantially more virtual machines per hypervisor host, VMware provides the lowest cost per application — even less expensive than so-called “free” virtualization solutions.

You might be tempted to compare this tremendous success with first-generation offerings from other virtualization vendors, such as Citrix WLB or SCVMM PRO Tips.  Coincidentally, both of those other solutions are not integrated –the resource balancing is performed by an external system that is monitoring virtual machine performance.  DRS is part of VMware vCenter and purpose-built for the virtual environment.

Note: the version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 that supports live migration is not slated to be available until late December 2009.  That means Microsoft virtualization environments cannot yet even attempt to accomplish what VMware does today.  And by today, I mean June 2006.

Meet the Engineer

In this video you can hear one of the main engineers behind VMware DRS:

Related posts:

1. PRO Tips: pros only, please
2. Say it ain’t so, PRO!
3. Don’t know much about resource pools
4. Two thousand?