VMware: Good product, uncertain times

Posted on | January 19, 2009 | No Comments

VMware: Good product, uncertain times.

Like we’ve said before here at Crowd Rent, we love virtualization.  We’d virtualize everything if we could.  I’ve never used anything but VMware and while it has it’s shortcomings, it’s amazing.  I couldn’t imagine managing a data center without VMs.  It’s like the first time you used broadband.  Could you go back to dial-up?  Ever drive a super car and try to go back to your Honda?  Not fun is it?

Virtualization will revolutionize computing in the same way x86 commodity compupting did to mainframes.  Ask an old timer about main frames and you’ll wonder why we ever moved away from them.  They were the best things ever, except they were big, expensive, hard to work on, and huge!  Well imagine commoditizing the hardware and the software.  I can separate the hardware from the software and move the “system” anywhere across the hardware, deploy multiple copies of the same machine, even power off hardware when it’s underutilized.

If you haven’t checked out virtualization please do.  There are a variety of systems, some like Xen that use paravirtualization or VMware that uses much tighter hypervisor-hardware integration.  Xen can be had for free as can VMware ESXi.  If you’ve got a spare server laying around try it out.  Try out VMware Server which is free desktop virtualization.  Google virtualization and you’ll find tons of information.

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