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Review: VMware's Worthy New Option For Virtual Servers

Monday, 31 July 2006 by Michel Roth

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier has written a review on VMWare Server Newsforge: VMware announced in February that it would be releasing VMware Server, an "entry-level virtualization product," for free. After several months of beta testing, VMware Server 1.0 has finally gone gold. After spending several days testing the 1.0 release, I'm pleased with its performance and ease of use, particularly given the price.

VMware is trying to hold on to its market-leading position by giving away some entry-level products to hook users and organizations early, before they standardize on competing products such as Virtuozzo or Xen. Given the quality of VMware Server, the strategy just might succeed.

Unlike its predecessor, VMware GSX, VMware Server offers support for virtual symmetric multiprocessing (SMP). SMP support is considered experimental at the moment, but I didn't encounter any problems with SMP enabled on one of my Linux virtual hosts that has an SMP kernel. I ran benchmarks and normal system loads to see if it had any issues -- it ran just fine, no problems at all.

One of my favorite features in VMware Server is the snapshot feature. If you have a system running as a virtual host, all you need to do is to take a "snapshot" before any major system change. If all goes well, no problem. If something goes south, you can revert to the system state prior to the snapshot with one button click. This is great for testing and production use.

The only thing that concerns me, and should concern any company investing in virtualization, is that VMware Server -- while "free" as in beer -- is still a proprietary product. VMware giveth, and VMware can take away. There's nothing to stop VMware from dropping VMware Server at a later date in favor of a product that requires an up-front license fee, or from removing features if the company deems it necessary to boost adoption of more expensive offerings. This isn't necessarily likely, and I'm not suggesting that I expect it to happen -- but it's something to be aware of.

VMware does have a plan to make money off of VMWware Server. The company sells support starting at $350 for VMware Server on a system with up to two CPUs for one year, and it also offers add-on products to make management of VMware Server easier. If you have only a handful of systems that will run VMware Server, you can easily get by using the freely available tools, but VMware is no doubt banking on bringing in support and add-on dollars after organizations get their first taste of virtualization goodness.

Licensing caveats aside, I really like VMware Server. It's a solid product, easy to use and administer, and the performance is top-notch. If you need a way to run multiple hosts on a single server, I'd put VMware Server at the top of the list.

Read on here.