I’ve been a long time VMware user. I bought the original workstation version at 1.0 a decade ago and have been upgrading it ever since. I thought it was the best thing ever though when their GSX version became free as the VMware Server line. It’s so nice to be able to setup guest machines and not have them running on your console, but in the background.
A couple of the reasons I liked VMware Server was that it was flexible on where it could run. It could be run on a Windows host, or (usually with a lot of work, googling, crying, hacking) on Linux. My guest images could easily transfer between the host operating systems with no effort.
Also, being able to use it on systems without Intel and AMD’s virtualization chipsets was very nice. VMware would use the extensions if found, and work almost as well if they were not. Two of my servers didn’t have them so VMware was a good choice to standardize on.
I also use VMware workstation on my desktop for daily work, so being able to move images between the workstation and server products was helpful.
I recently decided to check though to see if there was an update for VMware server yet. It’s been at version 6.0.2 for over a year and it doesn’t support Windows 7 guests like the workstation product does. I scoured the forums and came up with some alarming news. They dropped the product line back in January of 2010! All support for it ends this summer.
I have about 8 guest systems running virtually on my servers. I could probably keep using the server product but with no hope for updates, I might as well think about the future. I had two options: VirtualBox and Hyper-V.
VirtualBox is amazingly still a free product now that Oracle has its hands all over it. I keep trying it out once in a while and am usually pretty impressed. But I find that while it’s good for a workstation client, it’s a pain in the neck to use on a server. You end up using some horrible command line applications to get everything done. And the RDP console mode is highly unreliable. There are some web based consoles for it, but they’re designed to run on Linux systems of course.
The other choice is Hyper-V. Three of my servers now have the VT extensions so I can run Hyper-V on them. I can also run Windows Virtual PC on my development machines, so I have that ability to move drive images around if needed. I decided to try going this route to see how well it would work for me. I made backup copies of all my VMware images before converting them just in case.
I found a utility to convert the vmdk files to vhd files. I simply had to make sure any XP or 2003 images had an IDE driver installed, remove the VMware tools, and then convert the disks. I copied them to the Hyper-V servers and built the new virtual machines. Every one of my guests started up with no problems. Then, I added the Hyper-V drivers, fixed the IP addresses on the new NIC, and everything was great!
I had all my Windows based guests converted over the weekend. The one Ubuntu Linux guest had a different destination. I was hosting CommuniGate, Subversion, and my WordPress blog on it. I moved CommuniGate to the Windows server since they have a Windows version of the product. The server with VT was a great place to put it. I’ve retired the subversion repositories many months ago after I moved all my source code into Bazaar repositories on my Dropbox account.
As for the WordPress blog, it was a quick and easy transfer to the actual WordPress.com hosting site. I figured, why host this myself? I just setup an HTTP redirect in IIS on my Windows host to point to the WordPress site. I’ll change that when I get around to moving my domain records over to WordPress officially. After that was done, I just let the Ubuntu guest die.
So far, I’m very happy with Hyper-V running all the guests. I can set some CPU performance requirements for the images which I couldn’t do under VMware. Things are running smoothly and I don’t ever have to load that stupid horrible VMware web console anymore. That crappy thing couldn’t work for 20 minutes without failing somehow.
The one downside is that now that I’m on Hyper-V, I’ll never be able to switch my host machines back to Linux unless I rebuild all the images in Xen or KVM. That doesn’t sound very fun. If I lose my MSDN subscription, I’m going to have to figure things out pretty quickly. Of course, I probably won’t need all the test machines either at that point anyway. All of this is used for testing out and training on software products for my job.
As for my development machine and VMware workstation, I’ll probably leave that as is for now. I have a very important image there that I use daily for my job and I don’t think Virtual PC will cut it yet. VMware Workstation has this very nice ability to use multiple monitors for the guest desktop and that is very handy at times. Of course, Virtual PC could probably just integrate with my local desktop and give me a slightly better effect. I’ll have to try it out one day!