ESX Appliance?
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@coliver said:
I can understand why some people think a virtual machine host is an appliance. It does a single specific task, host virtual machines. That doesn't make them right... just that I understand it.
That would be like calling anything an appliance. A server is an appliance because it does one thing... sit there and be the hardware. The OS does one thing, it hosts applications. The application is an appliance because it only does one task.
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@thanksaj said:
Isn't Xen free?
Both Xen (just the hypervisor like ESXi) and XenServer (the ecosystem like vSphere) are completely free, there is nothing to buy whatsoever. vMotion, fault tolerance, storage vMotion, all of that stuff is free, included and limitless.
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@thanksaj said:
Ok, so the idea is possible in theory, but tell me @scottalanmiller , have you ever heard someone refer to an ESX appliance they just bought? Or talk about getting a quote for an ESX appliance? It's just not a term you hear, at least in my experience.
Within the last week, yes. There was a discussion about it being so common that many VMware partners sell nothing but that.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thanksaj said:
Ok, so the idea is possible in theory, but tell me @scottalanmiller , have you ever heard someone refer to an ESX appliance they just bought? Or talk about getting a quote for an ESX appliance? It's just not a term you hear, at least in my experience.
Within the last week, yes. There was a discussion about it being so common that many VMware partners sell nothing but that.
But not before that, right? I just don't think of ESX and appliance as being compatible terms in terms of generally accepted use, although, as you said you can technically make it work.
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@coliver said:
Oh... I meant in comparison to Hyper-V not in comparison to Xen. A couple of the blog posts I've read on the cost to the enterprise has Hyper-V as the more expensive solution at that scale when compared with a similar VMWare solution.
Once you want any degree of management, HyperV has always been the most expensive option on the market. Given that their primary marketing strategy is people deploying it out of confusion being "cheap" doesn't help them sell more product. Being expensive just improves the profit margin.
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@thanksaj said:
But not before that, right? I just don't think of ESX and appliance as being compatible terms in terms of generally accepted use, although, as you said you can technically make it work.
Apparently it has been pretty popular for a while. I guess HP and Dell both sell vSphere appliances now.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thanksaj said:
But not before that, right? I just don't think of ESX and appliance as being compatible terms in terms of generally accepted use, although, as you said you can technically make it work.
Apparently it has been pretty popular for a while. I guess HP and Dell both sell vSphere appliances now.
Weird. I've just never heard the term until today. And you saying that is the first time I've heard it used in an accepted context.
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@thanksaj said:
That has always irked me about Hyper-V. It's not a true hypervisor. It's basically a hypervisor-esque application running inside Windows.
What? HyperV is as much a hypervisor as any. And it is a type 1 at that (ESXi, HyperV, Xen and KVM are the four enterprise, type 1 bare metal hypervisors on the AMD64 market today.) It is in no way not a hypervisor. In no way not a type 1 and in no way runs on or in Windows and is not an application.
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@coliver said:
No, it is a true hypervisor, it runs underneath the Windows Server. It is basically the same as how Xen does it with Dom0.
Yes, it was modeled directly after Xen. Same architecture. It's how ESXi did it until 5.0 released too.
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And @scottalanmiller is back to posting on ML after a brief absence.
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@thanksaj said:
Never touched Xen in my life, so I can't say one way or another with that.
You should, it is the hypervisor that I think makes it easiest to learn about and understand what is actually happening.
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@thanksaj said:
And @scottalanmiller is back to posting on ML after a brief abcense.
Was playing AoE2 for one game.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thanksaj said:
And @scottalanmiller is back to posting on ML after a brief abcense.
Was playing AoE2 for one game.
Oh sure, be that way...
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@thanksaj said:
You still install it to the device though, right? You don't/can't run Hyper-V from a flash drive or SD card like ESXi, right?
You are SUPPOSED to run HyperV from SD card exactly like ESXi. It is the same best practice in both cases. You can run from disk in both cases too. The SD card is just a slow SSD in this case, so under the hood the hypervisor doesn't know the difference anyway.
What do you mean by "install to the device?" Every hypervisor is installed to the device, it has to be since type 1 hypervisors are installed on the physical server instead of an OS.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thanksaj said:
You still install it to the device though, right? You don't/can't run Hyper-V from a flash drive or SD card like ESXi, right?
You are SUPPOSED to run HyperV from SD card exactly like ESXi. It is the same best practice in both cases. You can run from disk in both cases too. The SD card is just a slow SSD in this case, so under the hood the hypervisor doesn't know the difference anyway.
What do you mean by "install to the device?" Every hypervisor is installed to the device, it has to be since type 1 hypervisors are installed on the physical server instead of an OS.
I meant installed on the system drives/RAID array directly instead of on a flash media source like an SD card or flash drive. My mistake.
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@milnesy said:
@thanksaj the new core is a hypevisor... it's just running a windows core rather than a linux core.
Actually it's just like Xen. Xen and HyperV are the hypervisors, they run on the bare metal. There is no Linux and no Windows involved. They each have a control environment (Xen calls this the Dom0.) In the case of Xen this can be Linux, BSD or Solaris (or anything with the right hooks.) It's flexible. In the case of HyperV it needs Windows there. But in both cases the hypervisor is the hypervisor. There is no Linux and no Windows in the hypervisor at all. Completely separate things.
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@thanksaj said:
Interesting...that is news to me. Sounds like MS is playing catch-up to get to VMware's level in a lot of ways...just my 2¢.
Such as? Most of the things that you are thinking, I feel, are things that HyperV has done since day one (Type 1 hypervisor, run from any media, etc.) The big deals are the high level things and scaling features that really don't matter in the SMB. HyperV is a little behind in the high end enterprise space. But for most customers they are roughly on parity and have been. VMware is a little faster and a little more robust, yes. But overall, very close. XenServer is screaming fast too for certain workloads and KVM for others. Each has their niche, all play well in the biggest, most demanding environments.
Remember that Azure and, by extension, Office 365's hosted environments are all HyperV.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@milnesy said:
@thanksaj the new core is a hypevisor... it's just running a windows core rather than a linux core.
Actually it's just like Xen. Xen and HyperV are the hypervisors, they run on the bare metal. There is no Linux and no Windows involved. They each have a control environment (Xen calls this the Dom0.) In the case of Xen this can be Linux, BSD or Solaris (or anything with the right hooks.) It's flexible. In the case of HyperV it needs Windows there. But in both cases the hypervisor is the hypervisor. There is no Linux and no Windows in the hypervisor at all. Completely separate things.
I wonder if Microsoft will change this in the future with all of the open source love they have at the moment. Although I kind of doubt it as they are trying to sell the management piece of it.
