Is VMWare support a possibility

Howdy,

An excellent question!

Today, I don't believe there is VMware support in Cloudmin.

But, they seem to be adding features to Cloudmin faster than, well, I dunno, something that's pretty fast :-)

I don't think that's an unreasonable request at all, and I'll make sure Joe and Jamie see it.

Thanks! -Eric

It's definitely on the agenda. OpenVZ took precedence because of the untimely death of K T Ligesh, and the very uncertain future of HyperVM (we've gotten dozens of requests for OpenVZ and HyperVM migration, already, despite the fact that I didn't even think anyone would have heard of Cloudmin yet except our existing users; we've done no marketing at all yet!).

My landlord (who is also in the tech industry and involved in cloud computing) has promised to get me in touch with the development community manager at VMWare, so we can get things properly rolling on that, but it's on hold until the OpenVZ and HyperVM migration stuff gets wrapped up.

I can't put any kind of date on VMWare support, as I haven't seen the API, haven't worked with VMWare in several years, and I don't yet know how long the other tasks on our todo list are going to take. But, it's definitely in the plans. We are seeking to be a hypervisor-agnostic layer on top of many kinds of virtualization, so that folks can build heterogeneous cloud computing services quickly and easily.

Cloudmin has a fairly extensible design that makes supporting new virtualization types (like VMware) relatively easy, but it would still take a fair bit of work to add .. so WMware support would be several weeks off at least.

Hi,

Since the topic is now 16 months old, I am bringing it up. Has any progress been made on Vmware support ? Are any concrete plans in sight ? I have had a terrible experience since a year with the stability of Virtuozzo (that is openVz) on several servers and I am planning to move on a more serious virtualization solution, and my preference is going to VMWare...

I know this is an old post but wondering if this is likely to happen in the near future (vmware support in cloudmin)?

I actually added a server with VMWare. All though vCenter works fine,
Cloudmin support would be nice to have... I now prefer VMWare over Xen

I don't really have a comparison here, since I have never been using Xen or KVM, so my views are surely a little one-sided. So I can't say what VMWare does better, I can only say what it does really good.

I've been using VMWare ever since they started small and simple with their Workstation version, later with VMWare Server under Windows and finally with ESXi hypervisor on a dedicated machine, and have been positively amazed all the time by the stability, simplicity, scalability and performance of their systems.

Right now I'm operating a hosted server with an Intel i7 (4 x 2.67 GHz with HT) and 24 GB RAM, on which 16-20 VMs are running simultaneously, and very smoothly. (It could surely be more, but two of the VMs are "Minecraft" game servers, which need a huge amount of non-sharable memory.) Installation of ESXi was, with a little support from the hoster, simple and easy. Management is the same, and the system is very stable.

In terms of memory: VMWare is very efficient there through its ballooning, management, resource reservation, memory sharing and compression features. In my tests, I managed to over-commit the physical memory up to 25% with no ESXi-side swapping. CPU sharing is very efficient. I managed to run 8 Windows Calc instances to fully load the 8 virtual CPUs, and still web servers running on the same machines stayed nicely responsive. The biggest "possible issue" by which one VM can affect others is excessive disk IO.

Keep in mind that, as opposed to Xen and any other open source Linux-based virtualization solutions, they have a huge head-start in terms of knowledge and experience, and a diverse palette of products, from desktop over small servers to ISPs.

Indeed, their full products costs quite some money, but you don't need those necessarily. ESXi is free, and runs perfectly on single servers. So, even if you only need to manage one, two or three ESXi hosts, a good control panel is essential.

They have such a good control panel of course, in form of the VSphere Client. But, the more, the merrier, so in your place, I would not categorically rule out adding VMWare support to Cloudmin.

VMWare has several versatile command-line level remote control APIs which can manage nearly all aspects of Server and ESXi, which should make it rather easy to implement all required functions in a third-party panel like Cloudmin.

As a closing note, one of my fellow administrators at university has, as far as my knowledge goes, been using KVM for virtualization in their workgroup before, and has now switched to ESXi. I shall ask him if he can give a less one-sided comparison. :)

There is an increasing number of hosting providers that use VMWare. It would be great if you started supporting it. Yes, VMWare isn't open source. But it works well. What would it take for you to support it?

I actually use Esxi which is free. The 3 Dell servers run very stable and I host Windows machines on it and some linux machines.
I tried Xen to run windows on it but cant make it work and grafix don't work (well)
KVM I have stayed away from.

vCenter is expensive but would come in handy to control VM's migration and so on.
I would use Cloudmin to do all the work if it was at all possible.

Also another server runs Xen with Cloudmin. I'd prefer to move that server to VMware as well. At home I have Workstation and Im very impressed.

At work (local government) we use only VMWare and we have 100's of servers and over 800 VM machines.
I think VMWare rules, however I have found out that esxi doesn't run on all hardware like plain Linux does...

I would add that even with vCenter, Cloudmin would be great, as it would allow unified management of all major virtualization technologies out there.