43 Responses

1. Comment by Dave — December 15, 2007 @ 3:54 am
   
   

   My test results were similar to yours. I found that it dramatically slowed the host PC, and I was never able to get the management interface to work fully in either Firefox or IE7. Like you, I wondered where the “real” interface went.

   I’ve been a big fan of VMWare for years now, and have been a paying customer since Workstation 4. Unfortunately, I think Microsoft is about to crush them on features and pricing this year.

   I bought ESX starter edition last month, only to find out that I can’t even buy the upgrade of Converter so I can migrate P2V direct to my ESX server. The new Foundations package claims that Consolidated Backup comes with it….but only if you spend $2500 on Virtual Center. I would think that even someone with 1 ESX server would want to backup their VM’s.

   I’m hoping they get a bit of a wake up call here and redeem themselves or I fear they will be losing a lot of market share this year.

2. Comment by Scott — December 15, 2007 @ 6:47 am
   
   

   I have a old server running Virtual Server and a newer one with VMWare Server. We’re doing all new implementations on VMWare. We are planning to limp along this way until we can switch everything to Hyper-V (who came up with that name?) and VMM. I can’t imagine why you would want to switch back to Virtual Server. I’d rather work around the drawbacks to VMWare than deal with the horrid Virtual Server product just to get VSS support…

3. Comment by Stephen — December 15, 2007 @ 1:35 pm
   
   

   Does Vmware server support VSS within the virtual machine?

4. Comment by Scott — December 15, 2007 @ 8:00 pm
   
   

   Stephen: The features supported in the virtual machine are dependent upon the guest OS, so if you’re running Windows Server 2003 or 2008 in the guest, the guest will have VSS support. The disadvantage to not having VSS supported by the virtualization software is that you can’t backup VMs while they are running. You have to pause them, do the backup, then restore them.

5. Comment by Scott — December 15, 2007 @ 8:01 pm
   
   

   Just for completeness, I should also mention that Vista has VSS, too.

6. Comment by Michael — December 17, 2007 @ 9:23 pm
   
   

   Dave, I also think that there will be hard times to come for VMware. One thing is for sure, the prices for virtualization software will go down. However, it will take a while until Microsoft will catch up with ESX.

   Scott, it will take at least 9 months until Hyper-V final will be available. I don’t want to wait so long. VMM + Virtual Server is certainly a better option than VMware Server 1 or VMware Server 2.

   Stephen, I have no idea about the purpose of this service, but I don’t think that it is for the guest OS. I am also not sure if it will be still available in the final version since it is not mentioned in VMware’s documentation.

7. Comment by Steve — December 17, 2007 @ 10:22 pm
   
   

   I swear to god, why not step up and buy ESX and VC and used VCB. OR, until you can step up to the real Enterprise software just treat your guests as physical boxes backing them up the same way a you backup physical boxes. It kills me when I hear people whine about free software not meeting their expectations, and others cry about having to buy software to perform a function (thats why one buys software). Not to mention its an effing beta, did you even bother to follow up with the vendor? GSAD!

8. Comment by Oljaitu — December 18, 2007 @ 4:51 am
   
   

   I agree with Steve! Not sure I buy bashing a free product in beta with all of the debug code enabled being judged as “a dissapointment” from what sounds like a a pro-Microsoft ad site at all! Since when has MS put out ANY bug-free software in final release let alone in beta…Sounds like the copy was run by MS Marketing first rather than a review of a final shipping product. And as to the comment of MS crushing VMware on features and pricing? VMServer is FREE!!! Are you comparing ESX with Virtual Server or Viridian (a yet to be shipping product??) MS has a long way to go to prove they can beat a 5 year headstart in virtualization technology that VMware has and granted, they have a great Marketing machine, but is that all it takes nowadays? Ad-slicks and no substance in the base technology? Then God help all of us in this field!!! I think I will start farming or ranching…

9. Comment by Michael — December 18, 2007 @ 9:32 pm
   
   

   Steve, no software product is really free. It always costs time to work with software, and time is money. I wasted my time with VMware Server 2. And let’s not forget that it is only free because Virtual Server is free, too. Do you remember how overpriced GSX was? I also think that ESX is too expensive. Virtual Server + VMM have already most of the features I need.

   Oljaitu, beta software can always be buggy. But this is no beta yet. Maybe it is an early alpha. Can you believe that they accidently left the exe of the old graphical interface in the installation folder? It is obvious that VMware is getting nervous. However, the bugs were not really a problem. I believe that they will fix them by the time the final comes out. My biggest complaint was about the web-based user interface. VMware is going into the wrong direction and I am not planning to join them.

10. Comment by Steve — December 19, 2007 @ 2:18 pm
    
    

    I understand that no software is free, if your time is that precious don’t waste it on beta code, don’t waste it on a free product that is not FOSS where updates are consistently rolling out. What i was trying to say before is your whiney and have no idea what the final version will be, no one does … and I doubt VMware is scared. Also, when you get in to multiple hosts and many guests ESX is not too expensive, looking at the power savings and the money saved/ earned reducing downtime. For someone who is on Microsoft’s jock you should love buggy software.

11. Comment by Chui Tey — December 24, 2007 @ 3:15 pm
    
    

    The web based U.I. on VMWare Server 2.0 chews up too much screen estate. (check my sig for a screenshot of it in action). I hope they fix it before 2.0 release proper.

12. Comment by Tim Walsh — December 25, 2007 @ 12:48 pm
    
    

    I’m also looking at the VMServer 2 Beta and was disappointed that the console appears to be going away. I was also disappointed that the Windows installation installed Tomcat instead of using IIS which is already running on my test machines. I’m not a fan of having 2 or more web servers running on a box. Other then being slow, which can be expected with a Beta that hasn’t been optimized for performance the only issue I have is with the web interface console, I tend to get a black screen and nothing else when I use it. Occassionally I’ll get the guest to show up. Again, it’s a Beta and a long way from production.

    Regarding Microsofts Virtual Server here’s a couple issues I have:

    1) No USB support
    2) Clusters are supported but require the SCSI device be dedicated to one shared disk. (training)
    3) Doesn’t support multiple processors
    4) Web interface, prefer to use VMCR-Plus when setting up machines.
    5) P2V appears to require the Physical machine to shutdown at the end of the conversion unlike VMWares Convert.

13. Comment by Jay — January 28, 2008 @ 6:49 am
    
    

    I have to agree that they must be insane to think this web interface is a good idea or that I want an extra web server running just to handle their interface.

    I’ve so far been very disappointed with MS’s offering as well.

14. Comment by Joe — January 28, 2008 @ 8:16 pm
    
    

    Anyone stop to think that perhaps, because the GUI is the only element that is not cross platform and must be developed specifically for each host OS, VMWARE is saving it for last. Perhaps they will even make it optional or an for $ upgrade to the server product.

    Keep in mind that the VMWare server product is primarily intended for use in application servers and is intended more for set it and forget it use. I can count the number of times on my fingers that I acually used a console (remote or otherwise) to manage my web, print, or even file servers. If they were running as a VM that was configured to start as a service, then I would spend all of a few hours a year dealing with a slow web interface.

    Though I agree that a web based console, and only that, is a risky avenue to take for vmware… it does make sense considering the intended use of the product. However I suspect that a console will be written for Windows, at least, prior to the final release. They just haven’t expended any effort on it yet as it would require too much effort to maintain as the software evolves.

15. Comment by Michael — January 29, 2008 @ 10:06 pm
    
    

    Jay, I agree. MS offerings are not really convincing thus far. At least, this ugly web interface is gone in Hyper-V.

    Joe, you are probably right about the cross platform issue. This will be the greatest problem for VMware in the future. Microsoft can just focus on Windows, while VMware has to make their software work on other platforms, too. There might be some customers who value the cross platform support, but I somehow doubt that it is worth it in the long run. If I want a virtualization under Linux, I would rather go for Xen anyway.

16. Comment by Tim Walsh — January 30, 2008 @ 12:50 pm
    
    

    I suspect the Web GUI is also to keep it in line with their ESX server management tools. Managing all the different virtual environments (ESX, Microsoft VPC & VS, VMWare Server, XEN, etc) from a single interface is becoming a key point in my opinion.

    I might not like the interface because it’s slow and clunky, but I suspect that’s the future and as the product moves toward final release the bugs will be worked out, and the interface will be optimized for better performance, provided we all feedback our issues and concerns to VMWare. They can only fix it if the Beta testers, that’s us, tell them what’s broke.

17. Comment by Michael — January 31, 2008 @ 10:45 pm
    
    

    Tim, you’re absolutely right and that’s exactly why I wrote this post.

18. Comment by Ben — February 4, 2008 @ 5:29 am
    
    

    I would imagine they should run a java based applet similar maybe to Cisco’s ASDM. This may simplify the cross platform support. While Im not a big fan of the web mgmt tools, I would say that how often do you really go in there? I mean you setup a couple servers, they get configed and your off and running. If you are constantly going in and out of the interface to do things then maybe workstation is a better product, since it also includes vm binding’s and bandwidth binding’s.

19. Comment by Josh — February 21, 2008 @ 9:08 pm
    
    

    I totally agree with the disappointment of their web-based only management interface. What a nightmare.

20. Comment by Another One — February 22, 2008 @ 10:37 am
    
    

    well, the web interface is there for installation/management purpose. I’ve almost never used the “real” vmware server interface for other tasks, preferring to accessthe virtual system with their preferred method: ssh/X forwarding and Remote Desktop/Terminal Services.
    And when installing and when those services or the networks are down, vmware provides another method to display the application desktop, available under the virtual machine hardware screen, which creates a vnc display with the screen content of the virtual machine, accessible with any vnc client out there

21. Comment by Andy — March 4, 2008 @ 12:37 am
    
    

    I could be wrong on the exact download but if you download vmware server 2.0 for linux there is a windows installer hidden in there for Virtual Infrastructure Client (possibly called VMware-viclient.exe). This works like the old vmware server console. Using this made it not such as much as the web interface. I think this program can also be used to manage an ESX server. Was not able to find a standalone download for this program.

22. Comment by Bryan — March 5, 2008 @ 5:04 pm
    
    

    Your assertion that VIC can be used to manage an ESX server is true. In fact I installed VMware Server beta 2 and then connected with VIC that I had installed already from having ESX server.

23. Comment by Josh — March 5, 2008 @ 7:26 pm
    
    

    Thats great that VIC can connect. Now lets hope they offer solutions for non-ESX customers.

    Thats true that the common method of connection to a VMserver be an RDP connection opposed to a console connection. But lets think about people that house infrastructures inside of a network and allow access thru a terminal server. When comparing a published VMserver console over citrix to a published browser over citrix you will feel the wrath of their stupidity.

24. Comment by adam newman — March 8, 2008 @ 12:43 am
    
    

    The web ui was avaiable in vmware server 1.0 it just was documented i tryed using it and it was the same crap that is in vmware server 2 it is not just slow in is poorly designed and is missing features that were in vmware server 1’s console application.
    I am going to run 1.0 util they release a console for vmware server 2 or untill I get so fed up with it that I join the microsoft camp.

25. Comment by adam newman — March 8, 2008 @ 12:43 am
    
    

    ment to say undocumented

26. Comment by John G — March 14, 2008 @ 8:06 am
    
    

    For those of you that have not tried connecting to Server 2 Beta using the VC Client should do it. It appears that VMware is moving the server product to behave more like ESX in terms of management. I was even able to add Server 2 Beta as a new host in VC (although there were some C++ runtime errors but that’s expected since the versions of VMware were so different). I was even able to perform operations such as entering maintenance mode, which didn’t exist in previous versions of Server.

    Everyone here is right; the Web UI is not the way to go. As someone pointed out, it existed in 1.1 and wasn’t really good. For those of you that took the survey, the very last question was “Do you prefer Web or Console?”

    I highly doubt VMware will release this product without a thick client; they’re just spending their efforts elsewhere. Overall I have been very disappointed with the development speed of all their products; they deliver almost as bad as Microsoft.

27. Comment by Willy Schott — March 30, 2008 @ 3:18 am
    
    

    At least there’s a silverlining hidden also inside the gigantic Windows installation. Please point your browser to https://:8333/client/VMware-viclient.exe —and there it is: the VMware Infrastructure Client 2.5 installer. No need to get the Linux package. And then say goodbye to the browser based UI.

28. Comment by Benderunit — March 31, 2008 @ 9:45 pm
    
    

    Autofit is working. You have to first enter fullscreen. Than it’s possible to scale the window and the guest system fits exactly into the window.

29. Comment by Segedunum — April 9, 2008 @ 5:48 pm
    
    

    I will admit to being slightly confused by some of what you’ve written, but yes, VMware 2.0 and the management tools do impress me a good deal less.

    For starters, the VI and MUI remote console has only been for just that - r-e-m-o-t-e access when absolutely necessary. The MUI was the only way I could set up the VM startup ordering in 1.x though, as the native console didn’t have it. However, it does look as if they have removed the VMware Console as a rich-client application in place of a Firefox plugin and the ability to connect straight to your guests from the desktop. That’s somewhat disappointing, and honestly I wish VMware would just start using a damn good cross-platform toolkit such as Qt and build a proper client administration tool. Managing virtual machines is not something you can reasonably do with a browser infrastructure.

    The bit I am confused about is the Volume Shadow Copy thing. As far as I’m concerned, a piece of virtualisation software shouldn’t need to know about it. VMware Server has support for virtual machine snapshots, and it also has a scripting framework where you can easily pause a VM, or take a snapshot and not pause it, and then have your backup software use VSS to backup your VM at that point in time while it continues to run. It doesn’t beat LVM snapshots on Linux, but it’s there.

    I do agree with other comments that VMware’s cross-platform strategy will do them in in the long-term. Microsoft only has to concentrate on Windows, VMware’s management tools leave a lot to be desired as rich clients and are getting worse (they’re going in completely the wrong technical direction), and KVM, not Xen or VMware, is the best native direction for Linux in the long run.

    If I were VMware I would just forget about creating a virtualisation product on Windows and stick to Linux. ESX is where their money is made anyway, and you’re always second best when competing on platforms your competitor owns. I’d start putting some major effort into the management tools, and they’re the only part I would make cross-platform. That would allow them to exist on a platform on their own terms, allow them to simply take advantage of Xen and KVM as they come on and give them some advantage over the competition. As it stands, they’re going to be outflanked.

30. Comment by Josh — April 9, 2008 @ 10:37 pm
    
    

    Good comments up above….Especially about how vmware should forget windows and worry about *nix. Now that the release of server08 ships with hyper-v (veridian) so i’ve read, thats true that vmware will be in the backseat for virtualization on the windows platform, if not now, by the next release.

    Thanks for the person who commented about VI console connection to server 2, that helps a lot. Unfortunately being a .net app, means there will be no thick client at all for linux.

31. Comment by John — April 22, 2008 @ 8:33 pm
    
    

    The web-browser-only interface alone was a deal-breaker for me. I am rolling back to 1.0.5 and testing out Virtual Box. The only current problem with VB is that the OS version doesn’t have USB 2.0 support, though the closed version does.

    I was most excited about VMWare 2.0’s support for 64 bit, but that can still be worked around in v1. I will stick with it for now as well and continue to seek alternatives unless VMWare gets off its ass.

32. Comment by Mel — May 9, 2008 @ 9:46 am
    
    

    I think the console was removed as VMware planned to make Server managable with Virtual Center all along. If you have ESX with VC 2.5 you can manage your ESX host and VMware Servers from a single window.
    It does however require an agent be installed on each host.

    Or you can buy Virtual Center for Virtual Server starting at $1500, includes 3 dual cpu agents.

    http://www.vmware.com/products/server/vc.html

33. Comment by Brendan — May 11, 2008 @ 6:19 am
    
    

    I’m also confused why the author is expecting enterprise service from a beta free product? As to MS even getting close to ESX, it’s quite laughable. We’re extremely happy with our 30-ESX install SAN-booting with DRS, HA and soon to be using Site Recovery Manager. Windows has become an application layer now, not an OS as such since all our servers are baby-sat by their ESX host, and so it will be for the foreseeable future!

34. Comment by Michael — May 13, 2008 @ 9:42 pm
    
    

    Brendan, all I expect is VMware to compete with Microsoft. I wonder who will use VMware Server 2 when Hyper-V is released. VMware should at least provide a simple GUI-based management tool. ESX is something different of course. This virtualization solution plays in another league.

35. Comment by Jorge — May 22, 2008 @ 9:13 pm
    
    

    Michael, I beg to totally disagree with you and well said Brendan.
    I had some experience with the earlier versions,1.0.1, 1.0.3 and was very satisfied with the new server 2. Even just being in Beta, it really won me over. I love the new WEB based interface. You complain about the console, it was for me the best improvement. You can have it as a window or full screen with very steady mouse control and no effort at all.
    All this from a free piece of software! Come on.
    By the way, I am running it on an HP DL380 G5 server with Windows Server 2003 x64.

36. Comment by Dave — May 25, 2008 @ 6:06 pm
    
    

    Jorge, your experiences aren’t common. I’ve been playing with Server 2 for a week and the web interface is 3-5 times slower than the old console. It’s taking me forever to do any maintenance on my VMs. The worst part is that I frequently get disconnected with “serviceNotAvailable” errors. No rhyme or reason to it — I just have to log in, start over and hope I can do what I need to before getting booted again.

    The company I work for is evaluating VMWare for in-house needs (I’m not officially part of that team) and I fervently hope they haven’t run across this beta yet.

    I hope they’re brewing up a new console interface somewhere in the background.

37. Comment by Michael — May 27, 2008 @ 10:40 am
    
    

    Jorge, whether you like a certain user interface or not is certainly a matter of taste. But it is a matter of fact that the hype of web-based user interfaces for management tools is over. Many vendors of management tools including Microsoft acknowledged that the price for having a platform independent user interface is too high. Most admins use Windows as desktop OS, therefore a web-based user interface is rather pointless. And yes, VMware Server is free, but so is Hyper-V. To be honest, I think that VMware Server on Windows hosts is dead.

38. Comment by Tubeme — June 5, 2008 @ 6:54 pm
    
    

    Interesting disscusion. I personaly tryed both VMWare Server 2 b2 and the Hyper-V beta which comes with Server 2008.

    I really liked the Vmware console but I had no problems using the Browser for the Server 2. Actually I use the console not more than once a month even less!!!! Ussusaly I start the virtual machine and then forget about it. That’s the point of having virtual server - to act as a real server. Then I use RDP connection as I ussualy do for managing my server boxes. I use pretty nice RDP VNC client and thus I’ma able to manage all my mixed (Win+Lin) environment. So the console is not that bad. The thing i noticed is that you have to be patient a little bit with the plug in and wait 20-30 seconds to load preperly until you start working. My VMWARE Server 2 host is on SUSE SLES 10 with installed couple of Server 2003 R2 SP2 x64 guests. So far so good. Very nice performance, no problems at all. We even use one of the virtual guests for production in our company and we host our Sharepoint and SQL server for the Sharepoint in it. It is doing fantastic job. I see complain about the VMWARE console not running on Fire Fox nor on Vista. I tested so far vmware server on Vista x64 host no problem with firefox and ie6,7. In my office we use SUSE SLES10 as host again no problems with the firefox inside the suse host, nor with firefox and ie6,7 using it from another vista box to manage the server. So far beta2 is good. beta1 was terrible but may be vmware is reading more often their forum because they got a lot of feed back and changed a little bit the console. So I think they will release pretty good and stable sistem finaly.

    About the Hyper-V. It is not bad at all. Their concept is very DEEP by the way concerning the internal construction of the virtual idea. The main difference between the two is the way guests are interacting with the hardware. Mycrosoft use their hypervisor which is about 1MB at very low level. They even say that Server 2008 is going to sit on top of it when they are ready with the hypervisor. So microsoft is going to attack ESX, because in the future they will going to virtualise the whole Windows Server 2008 even in no Hyper-V setup. You will not notice the difference. Also their hypervisor will work in an entirely different model. The hypervisor will be like a bus which will give full hardware access to the guests. So the guests in Hyper-V will see the devices as they are. So you will have to install drivers for the devices in each guest. This will totaly make the guests as real servers on top of the same hardware. ESX and the Server are using thir own devices which in turn comunicat with the hardware. May be they are developing something different now (vmware i mean) because a fired of mine, gold partner of both micorosft and vmware was pitched to take part in some very secret vmware project. He had been offered to sign 600page contract for confidenciality though before he could participate…

    Despite all this nice stuff that is comming from Microsoft I had terrible experience settign up single Server 2003 R2 SP2 x64 guest in the server2008 hyper-v!!!! The set up of the networking was terrible and I crashed the server 2008 a couple of times until I get it right. This was terrible experience. A firedn of mine got the Hyper-V RC but I don’t have it still so Microsoft may be made some improvements.

    I will not use the Hyper-V for production at this stage to tell you the truth.

    I use vmware server 2b2 in production. My company has the crazy idea of puting the ISA server in a virtual machine!!! last year. We did it on vmware server 1.0.5 1.0.6 and soon we will host it on server2. We have a pretty heavy trafic and a lot of security, but had no problems at all!!!! ISA in virtual machine. The guys that make our IT support told me last year tha I’m crazy to put it in virtual machine. I did it it works like charm. Even faster than hard box. The thing is that for hosting the virtual machine in my office we use always LINUX/UNIX especialy SUSE. SUSE are very closely related to vmware and they have some joint development.

    So I see future in both products. So far vmware is showing better stability and reliability than Microsoft in the virtualization. At this stage even with Server 2008 instalations in my company wit Hyper-V I will stick with SUSE host vmware server windows guests! And that is because ESX is kind of simmilar idea. Despite vmware is telling that their ESX is not a posix kernel (ESX is a kernel + hypervisor on a kernel level) I’m sure they use code and ideas from the opensource linux kernel development. Recent versions of linux kernels have virtualization on kernel level.

    Just my 2 cents.

39. Comment by Charles — July 7, 2008 @ 6:21 pm
    
    

    > Under Firefox, I got the error message
    > “Installation of msvcr71.dll failed. Error Code
    > -202.”

    Run FF as Administrator to install the plugin.

40. Comment by Baz — July 9, 2008 @ 1:08 am
    
    

    my 2c regarding VSS usage with VMware.

    I moved from VMware Server to ESX to leverage the High Availability feature of VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure. This is a key feature where VMware leaves Microsoft’s virtualization offers in the dust.

    The neat thing about ESX is that it supports NFS datastores. NFS is growing steadily in popularity and has become a reliable, cost effective, not to mention fast (search for netwapp solutions if you need convincing) alternative to iSCSI and FC.

    Now back to VSS, our backend storage servers run Windows 2003 and share VMDK’s over NFS exports to our ESX servers. Because the storage servers are running Windows the VSS service is available and using backup exec’s VSS plug in we connect directly to the storage server and backup all VMDK’s while the VMs are online. Pretty nifty.

    The performance of this method of backup is also noteworthy at around 50 - 80% utilization of GB Ethernet at an average of 3.8 GB/minute.

41. Comment by Dan Delaney — July 9, 2008 @ 6:40 pm
    
    

    It looks as if this review was indeed jumping the gun. The website for VMware Server 2 RC1 states that it does, in fact have VSS support. Also, the Web interface works extremely well. The console actually pops up a separate window that pretty much acts like the old VMware Server Console. Personally, I love the fact that I don’t have to go download a separate application to install on my desktop just to access my VMware Server console. And like another poster said, I very rarely need to do that anyway. Once I have the VMs set up and running, they just go.

    So install VMware Server 2 RC1, give it a try, and see if any of the critiques in this review still apply.

    –Dan

42. Comment by Michael — July 12, 2008 @ 8:55 am
    
    

    Dan, when I wrote this review, VSS was not yet supported. As to the web interface, this is certainly a matter of taste. However, I think that VMware Server 2 is not a match for Hyper-V.

43. Comment by YAhoo — July 19, 2008 @ 8:43 am
    
    

    I hate the ESX-eque interface! Please give me back the thick client!

    Also to use disk images (ISOs) in 2.0, why do they have to be located in my storage folders? What a pain…

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