It looks like in the wake of a declining stock price EMC/VMware is already laying off divisions, to ‘cut costs’ and I just received word from a friend that the “Hosted UI” group responsible for all these great products, and the former VMware Server/GSX products were all let go.
A Tribute to VMware Workstation, Fusion, and Hosted UI
Which to me is kind of crazy as this eliminates the only desktop product that could run VMware ESX on the desk for building virtual clusters. Â I further guess it means that for what I like to do, I’ll eventually have to find one of those super expensive video cards that works with ESX to passthrough. Â Or just drop any and all VMware stuff, and head straight into KVM territory and just get used to OpenStack being a fragmented disaster.
In addition they also closed the Burlington tech support centre.
Oh well, nothing lasts forever.
That’s a real shame. VMWare Workstation and Fusion are fantastic products. I’ve been using VMWare since 2001 and Openstack since 2011 (Bexar release).
Openstack is great but it is certainly not a replacement for the workstation products. I dare you to do an OS install on a VM using Openstack. While it is doable, there is no inherent mechanism in Openstack to spin up a blank hard disk image and then mount an ISO for install. Openstack was meant to provide curated images. These images need to be prepared in advance and then uploaded to the system. KVM with Virtual Machine Manager (the basis of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) will do what you expect it to, Hyper-V remains a good option if you are a Windows guy. Virtualbox? Parallels?
and that is the thing, can KVM run ESX? Can it run itself? Does it matter?
It’s not good signs that is for sure.
Yes, KVM/QEMU supports nested hypervisors.
To get ESXi installed in KVM you need a patch for QEMU:
http://mattinaction.blogspot.com/2014/05/install-and-run-full-functional-vmware.html
Wow awesome! I know no business would ever sign off on running vmware on openstack, but it’s kinda funny it’ll run.
And that patch is very minimal, so maybe it’s something that can move forward, although the Qemu/KVM folks are kinda famous for changing everything in between seemingly minor revisions (on the outside anyways).
I didn’t find VMWare Workstation all that nice to run on Linux, it could be painful to deal with patching their kernel modules. KVM + virt-manager and VirtualBox are both a lot easier to run, at least under Fedora or CentOS. Maybe I’m not noticing some performance differences, but functionality wise I don’t miss VMware Workstation.
I remember when VMWare Workstation was first released and participated in the trial programs. It was nice to FINALLY have your own VM on a PC, amazing where it went from there. I might have an old copy of 2.0 somewhere too.
I also recall VMWare releasing a special trial version of Workstation that could run OS/2 with a working set of additions. They landed up not pursuing it and those additions refused to work in release copies.