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Comment by cdavid | Hacker News Reader

Vmware is one of the few software I have ever bought, I am pretty hardcore open source otherwise.

Vmware works very well, has top notch clone/backup/rollback feature, can automatically install tons of different OS. That's a real time saver.

I use kvm at work where we don't have vmware licenses, and while it does work nicely, there is still no working rollback that I know of, and the network configuration is a PITA in general. Vmware frees me from all that hassle that I frankly don't want to deal with.

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Oh come on. ESX isn't the shining example you make it out to be, true KVM doesn't have as nice snapshots as ESX, but ESX has snapshots that are implemented very poorly - a never-ending delta that grows and grows and grows and takes performance with it eventually too. How many times have I lose a VM while cleaning up snapshots? Not enough to count on more than one hand, but that's still too many times.

Have you ever seen a crashed ESX Server with no community support, tons of home-brew utilities with wired command line arguments which throw a bizarre error messages to you that even google know nothing about? I did. ^_^

The idea is about reducing complexity and reusing community-tested solutions, not creating a new layer of complexity with a coded in a rush, badly tested poorly documented closed-source layer.

btw, if I use native lvm I can get a lot of flexibility.

edit: some BS removed.

btw, there is still no x86_64 xen-host for a modern kernels.

I feel sorry for your experience, it just does not match mine. Note that we are not talking about the same products - I mainly use vmware workstation/player/fusion (I deal a lot with cross platform issues in some medium-size open source projects).

Concerning things coded in a rush, I cannot say about vmware, but libvirt and the associated tools certainly are far from mature in my experience, at least for an end user.

I had once a system which runs 64-bit FreeBSD, RHEL and Solaris on one Core-Quad box with Fedora 13. It used for testing mostly while FreeBSD instance was used as a Windows VPN server (mpd5) and OpenVPN.

Btw, there is an issues with last updates of qemu-kvm in Fedora 13. beware.

ESX Server does not have community support, but it has commercial support.

If you are tenacious and patient enough to make it past the first tier of support, you will get your crashed server fixed, possibly faster than it would take to wait for an answer on a mailing list.

It was Citrix, not VMWare, that bought XenSource.

Oh. Thank you. Need more sleep. ^_^

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