Hosted products require a general purpose OS to be running directly on the hardware, such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. The Mircosoft Hyper-V product and VMware workstation, VMware server are hosted products. The bare metal products released by VMware are ESXi and ESX Servers.
In host environment, the virtualization layer needs to provide both OS specific user-level components to access the general purpose OS, and kernel components to build virtual environment. The virtualization overhead is higher on this model because every I/O operation needs to go through a general purpose OS.
In bare metal product, the virtualization overhead is much lower since the I/O operation will be on the hardware directly.In host environment, the virtualization layer needs to provide both OS specific user-level components to access the general purpose OS, and kernel components to build virtual environment. The virtualization overhead is higher on this model because every I/O operation needs to go through a general purpose OS.
Since the performance concern, I would use the hosted virtualization products on my desktop, and bare metal products for enterprise usage.
The popular hosted products are:
1. VMware Workstation: It is targeted to power users and developers. The concept is quite like the Windows workstation: it can perform most of the virtual features, but it only focus on one virtual machine.
2. VMware Server: It allows installing and running multiple VMs on a small server. The customer can control multiple servers remotely via a remote client. This product is targeted to small environments, mostly development and testing. The concept of VMware server is quite similar to Windows server: it focus on multiple virtual machines, and provide services for all the virtual machines. It should be all right to support 2~8 virtual machines, but if we have more virtual machines, the performance will be hugely impacted by the indirect accessing hardware.
3. VMware Fusion: this is the only VMware product for the Macintosh. It allows the user to run
Windows, Linux or any other supported OS as a virtual machine on a Mac. It includes several
advanced features not available on other products such as complete application integration with the Mac OS look-and-feel.
4. VMware Player: Free product and it allows users to run-only virtual machine created in other VMware products such as Workstation or Server. It does not have many management functions as other VMware product, but it is a good product for less powerful machines.
5. Windows Hyper-V: I would describe it as the prodcut in the same level as VMware server. Basically it is a windows OS with capability to run other OS. It is all right to run multiple Virtual Machines, but when come to more virtual machines, the performance degrade dramatially.
Since the bare metal products are mostly used on enterprise, and used as IT infrastructure , it always goes with Virtualization Infrastructure. I will spend more effort on these bare metal products in the later articles. The current popular bare metal products are:
1. VMware ESX: It is very scalable, and have a lot of fancy features. It typically has better performance than hosted products. The number of Virtual Machines in one physical server is much higher.
2. VMware ESXi: It is free! ESXi is a thin version of ESX. It almost has the same features as ESX, but spends less amount of system resources: It only uses 32M harddrive. It is a perfect version to play with. The ESXi does not have the host console as ESX, so the virtualization client needs to be downloaded by customers to manage the virtual host and virtual machines.
Since the bare metal products are mostly used on enterprise, and used as IT infrastructure , it always goes with Virtualization Infrastructure. I will spend more effort on these bare metal products in the later articles. The current popular bare metal products are:
1. VMware ESX: It is very scalable, and have a lot of fancy features. It typically has better performance than hosted products. The number of Virtual Machines in one physical server is much higher.
2. VMware ESXi: It is free! ESXi is a thin version of ESX. It almost has the same features as ESX, but spends less amount of system resources: It only uses 32M harddrive. It is a perfect version to play with. The ESXi does not have the host console as ESX, so the virtualization client needs to be downloaded by customers to manage the virtual host and virtual machines.
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