Modeblue

I’ve been using VMWare (Server, and GSX before that) for a few years now, and its always done the job. Its consistently shown better performance & reliability when compared to MS VirtualServer and the common complaint that its difficult to install (via linux CLI) doesnt ring true for experienced linux server admins.

However, I have been wanting for a good excuse to use the XEN based VirtualIron, and finally got the chance. VirtualIron have the option to used shared storage & several nodes to allow livemigration and redundancy, but I went for a standalone server with 2 quad core CPUs & a meaty 16gb RAM, with 6 SAS disks in a RAID 10 for fault tollerant performance.

The setup is wonderfully simple, write an ISO to disc, and boot from it, then walk through a simple configuration menu for network setup etc and it installs a SLES distro with the hypervisor & tools. No manual installs, no gritty code compiling – all very user friendly. When the machine has been configured and restarted, browsing to the given IP in a web browser brings a welcome page with links to documentation, logging, Administration Manager (license keys etc) and Virtualization Manager java applications.

Once in the VM configuration screen, setup of a machine is a little more complicated than VMWare, because of the shared resources, but this is easy to understand with some testing.

The major benefits that are immediately obvious are:

• Management of multiple Servers within one interface.
• Rollback for uncommited commands
• Management of shared resource pools
• Web based java management interface (works on all platforms).

To be continued….