One step further away from VMWare

Here’s a long time VMWare user that is about to dump it for good. The last straw: ESXi!

We’ve just installed an ESXi 4. Other than the over-simplicist setup (I couldn’t find how to set the partitions) and the lack of standard Unix services (ok, I can understand why, but man this is annoying), the last straw was the apparently network bandwidth capping.

VMWare doesn’t depend on open protocols to manage remote file systems, but on it’s own implementation. On this implementation I couldn’t go over 4MB/s, even using some alternative referenced faster tools. After some binging it looks like VMWare capped this on version 4 <update>Fixed broken link</update>. Incredible And since we are using free software we have to depend on standard tools and protocols to guarantee backup.

We’ll try NFS to see if we can get over this stupid limit. If it doesn’t work we’ll probably ditch ESXi. And now for the next options:

• VMWare Server over Windows or Linux (our present solution)
  • pros: less memory greed than Hyper-V, porting is direct
  • cons: no hypervisor (not has fast as Hyper-V)
• Hyper-V
  • pros: hypervisor (speed!)
  • cons: conversion needed

Let’s see how it goes.

 

<update>

Ok, now we have SSH and FTP on ESXi, and over FTP it seems like the capping has gone :)

</update>