[ale] VMware ESX Server Alternative

[Jonathan Rickman]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 11:43:59 -0500, Nick Travis <wormfishin at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm looking to implement a VMware ESX server, but I wanted to know if
> anyone had any other suggestions, what I need to do is run about 6-8
> windows desktops(2000 and XP) on one server.  I'm not worried about
> the horsepower on the server.  It's got quad 3ghz processors and 12gb
> of ram.  Each of the virtual machines will have a good amount of
> network traffic, but will have very little interaction with the hard
> drives.  If the test works out it will be rolled out to 10 machines or
> so at which point the licensing become pretty expensive.  Anyone have
> any experience with something like this?

The only real alternative is GSX server, but having run it in
production for a while now I would not recommend it due to occasional
stability issues. I'm moving everything to ESX. With that kind of
hardware, you should be able to run a dozen servers easily. The only
thing I would suggest is adding a few NICs to the box to ensure that a
shared NIC doesn't become a bottleneck. I have found that 3-4 virtual
machines per Gb NIC is a good target. I wouldn't put more than 2 on a
100Mb NIC. If you do end up choosing GSX, turn off hyperthreading and
use RH9 straight out of the box with no updates and the default
kernel. That seems to be the most stable config for me. I've also
experienced good stability with Windows 2003 as a host for GSX 2.5.2,
but I haven't tried 3.1 on it yet and probably will not.

--
Jonathan