Virtual Reality

So I was evangelizing OS virtualization software to my dear friend W this weekend. He's a power-sysad who maintains both Windows and *nix systems for a living. Sadly, he hasn't had an excuse to get into playng with virtualization tools such as VMWare, Hyper-V, XenServer. Many with much more experience with VM offerings than I have written much on comparisons of each (e.g. http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8880 ). Although I was introduced to virtualization with MS's Virtual Server 2005, I primarily have used MS Hyper-V on my research server to really start poking into using VMs. But as of late, I've started using VMWare Workstation v6.5 at work. Although I didn't much like the admin console in VMWare as much as the simpler (and I think, more intuitive) one in Hyper-V Manager, I've come round more and more to liking VMWare. The performance of the VM guests seems a bit better on my laptop's VMWare than what I see on my more robust hardware running Hyper-V. This could be that the configuration of the host OS and the overhead of Server 2008, yet I would have expected that 64bit dual-core CPU to be a bit faster than my WinXP 32bit laptop acting as a host.

So it seems that MS has now released a free version of Server 2008 Hyper-V. I'm not sure I'd want to bother with the nuances of this version for the sake of getting Hyper-V, but for those who want to experiment with yet another "free" version, there is now an option for true MS Hyper-V without having to buy a Server 2008 license. Personally, it seems that with the availability of VMWare Workstation and Server created VMGuests, one might be just fine with VMPlayer for personal research of alternate Guest OSs. For a more robust network solution, I will be sticking with Hyper-V (since I'm so Microsoft biased), but am curious to hear my *nix-capable friend's conclusions as he digs into the plethora of (wider) options available to him (e.g. Red Hat Fedora's KVM, opensource XEN). There is no doubt in my mind that those who have wrestled with maintaining networks too small to justify enterprise-class systems-management tools MUST investigate virtualization tools or risk being rightly identified as holdouts of an antiquated-mindset.