VMware Floats Beta of Upcoming VMware Server 2 Hypervisor

Published: November 29, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server virtualization software maker VMware has announced a beta of its upcoming VMware Server 2 hypervisor, which is expected to be launched in 2008. Like the first release of VMware Server, which is the hypervisor that used to be known as GSX Server and that put the company into the data center for the first time five years ago, the second release of the product is expected to be freely distributed. It will not be an open source product, however.

VMware's core money maker is the bare-metal ESX Server 3 hypervisor and the VMware Infrastructure 3 management and disaster recovery tools that surround it. ESX Server runs alone on the iron (which is what bare metal means) and provides isolation between virtual machine partitions running on a server. By contrast, GSX Server and its kicker, VMware Server, run atop either Windows or Linux server operating systems and then allow a hypervisor tucked inside that operating system to be carved up with a hypervisor to support multiple operating system instances. In the case of ESX Server, only a crash of ESX Server or the iron itself can knock out the partitions, but with GSX Server and VMware Server, a crash of the host operating system can knock out everything running inside of it. This is an important distinction in the case of VMware's products, since VMotion--the feature that allows running workloads to be transported between two physical servers--does not work with VMware Server, but only with ESX Server. If you want high availability and resiliency in your virtual infrastructure, you have to pay for it.

That said, VMware Server is a great way to seed a vast customer base of customers who want to virtualize their servers, even without all of the nifty VMware Infrastructure 3 features. And apparently there are plenty of them. VMware says that it has counted over 3 million downloads of VMware Server 1 since it offered the product for free in July 2006. About 70 percent of these licenses for VMware Server 1 went into small and medium businesses, who obviously cannot afford to shell out thousands of dollars for virtualization tools until they prove their worth to management.

The beta code for VMware Server 2 is available now, and it includes a number of new features. The updated code will support a broader range of hardware and includes a Web-based management console that is the same for both Windows and Linux host operating systems. The update will support nearly three dozen guest operating systems, including various Linux distributions (including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and Ubuntu 7.10), Windows Server 2003, the beta of Windows Server 2008 (formerly known as Longhorn Server), and Windows Vista. VMware is also pulling in some features from ESX Server, allowing VirtualSMP support for up to two processor cores in a single virtual machine and up to 8 GB of main memory to be allocated to a single virtual machine. This is important for customers who are increasingly using multicore processors to boost the performance of their applications. VMware Server has to scale its base capability along with the increasing core count. VMware Server 2 also includes support for paravirtualization using the Virtual Machine Interface (VMI), an evolving standard being put forth by VMware and others to allow operating systems in virtualized environments to link to each other and to the hypervisor to improve performance. VMware Server 2 will also support USB 2.0 peripherals.

The new VMware Server will also come with an optional enterprise support contract, giving customers who want to deploy the freebie code the hand-holding they expect from distributors of software they put into production. VMware has not said precisely when VMware Server 2 will be available or what that support contract will cost. Business-class (12x5) support costs $350 a year per license for a two-socket server and premium (24x7) support costs $450 per year per two-socket server. A license to a VirtualCenter 2 (not the updated 3 release) costs $600 per two-socket server as well. Hopefully VMware will provide the Web-based management console for VMware Server 2 for free.

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