It’s been a “long weekend” here in Sydney: today is a public holiday (though the occasion for it escapes me… perhaps something to do with Labour Day? Who knows!)

I’ve spent most of the day finalising my server setups. Now that my new desktop has arrived, my old quad core becomes The Other Half’s PC, and TOH’s old PC becomes my new ’spare server’. It’s not bad as these things go: dual core Core 2 Duo, 3GHz, 4GB RAM, 1TB hard disk space. So I thought I’d try a bit of free (as in zero cost) bare-bones virtualisation and see how I got on.

I started with Citrix Xen Server 5, then Citrix Xen Server 5.5 (the current release). I moved on to Vmware’s ESXi 3.5 and then Vmware’s ESXi’s 4.0 (again, the current release). I tried Hyper-V (Microsoft’s offering in this virtual space). And I wrapped up with a dabble with Oracle’s own VM-Server, version 2.5.

I’ll save the gory details for a later post, because it’s worth doing a proper side-by-side comparison of these things. But the short story is: Xen Server 5.0 installed extremely well, but when trying to create a Centos 5.3 x86_64 virtual machine, the Centos installer lost contact with the Xen Server’s DVD drive immediately after booting, rendering further installation impossible. Call that the deadest of dead-ends, then! This didn’t happen with the more recent Xen Server 5.5, however, and I was therefore able to install the Xen Server, its Windows client tools and create a Centos 64-bit virtual machine in precisely 27 minutes flat… which is amazing, I think, as these things go (especially as I was cooking dinner at the time). The only slight problem was that the Centos installation refused to install graphically and subsequently refused to run X at all… so it was a command-line only affair. That’s not the end of the world, of course, since it’s possible to run an X server on your Windows machine and have a graphical experience of a console-only virtual machine. But it’s not ideal.

ESXi Server was an extremely quick install, but it’s another 100MB download to get hold of the Windows remote administration client which is mysteriously called V-Sphere …and which, as it turns out, doesn’t actually run on Windows 7! There are workarounds: they involve downloading a dll which could contain absolutely anything from a website whose trustworthiness you have to take on, er, trust. And then you have to hack around a few XML files and keep your fingers crossed. Eventually, it does all work, but the experience is deeply, deeply nasty and not one I’d recommend.

Hyper-V was a success, in the sense that I had a working Centos 5.3 virtual machine within an hour and a half… but the graphics were all messed up, with the Centos machine needing to be set to an 800×600 display before it would display correctly on an old 1280×1024 monitor. Set it actually to display at 1280×1024 and it looked more like 3856×1900… very, very large and unusable! If you didn’t mind working in a tiny screen, or forever scrolling around an enormous one, I suppose you could call it workable. But yet another download (this time, 200MB+) was needed to get the Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 installed… only then to discover that no matter what one did, you just kept being told that you lacked the permissions necessary to administer the virtual server. Apparently, if you faff around with assorted Group Policies and DCOM permissions, you might get it all working, but I never did. So, if you don’t mind running everything direct off the virtual server itself, no problemo. But if you want to manage it from your Windows 7 desktop, forget it, basically.

Oracle’s own virtualisation server was slick enough… but incredibly fiddly to use, with the need to pre-provision everything (such as the Centos installation disks) made incredibly difficult. (Think of it like having to pre-declare all your variables before being allowed to use them!) It doesn’t help that there’s still no Windows client software for remote administration of the virtual machines: so you’re reduced to creating a virtual Linux machine on your Windows desktop so you can administer a virtual Linux machine on your Oracle VM Server! Pathetic, to be honest, and far more trouble than it’s worth. Especially since installing the ‘client’ software involves an incredibly adventurous and lengthy install of a complete Oracle XE database server, plus a mountain of Oracle Application Server componentry. I kept seeing visions of sledgehammers and nuts, to be honest. After all that, there’s not even the facilty to just say, ‘please install from the DVD what I’ve just installed in the Virtual Server’s physical DVD drive’. Oh no. Nothing that simple. Various import options are available to make an already-obtained ISO usable as a VM installation source, but none of them worked for me. My server just sat there, promising me mountains of virtual pleasure, but denying me any of it. Meanwhile, I’d been forced to create an additional amply-apportioned virtual server simply to act as the managing remote client for the server I’d intended to create. Bizarre in the exteme.

Short story, then: Windows Hyper-V works, but remote administration is a bugger. Xen Server works incredibly simply, swiftly and elegantly…but without X, it’s a more complex command-line only experience (update: but this can be fixed!). ESXi is OK, but seems fiddly, and doesn’t have a good Windows 7 client. And Oracle’s own Virtual Server offering is a complete load of unmanageable nonsense as far as I’m concerned.

A detailed write-up to follow, in other words. Meanwhile, a lot of fun, even more frustration… and some surprising outcomes. (I had expected Oracle’s offering to be a lot more elegant than it was, for example!)

Tags: Centos, Virtualisation, Windows 7, Xen
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Virtualisation, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.