The selling points of x86 server virtualization are by now common knowledge. By moving systems off dedicated, underutilized servers, and using virtual machines to consolidate them on fewer boxes, you can reduce power, cooling, and space requirements, and you can save a bundle in hardware costs. After the bean counting, VMs can help ease provisioning, load balancing, and disaster recovery.

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• VMware's virtual infrastructure

The Bottom Line VMware Infrastructure 3 VMware, vmware.com Excellent  8.8 criteria score weight Manageability 8 25% Scalability 9 25% Usability 9 25% Setup 9 15% Value 9 10% Cost: Pricing per two sockets: Starter, $1,000; Standard, $3,750 (includes Virtual SMP); Enterprise, $5,750 (includes Virtual SMP, VMotion, DRS, and HA) Platforms: ESX runs on Intel- and AMD-based server hardware and supports Windows, Red Hat Linux, Suse Linux, Sun Solaris, and Novell NetWare OSes. Bottom Line: VI3 reinforces VMware’s standing as the leading virtualization platform vendor. Plenty of new features including iSCSI support and Distributed Resource Scheduler, as well as improved performance, will grease the wheels of server virtualization in enterprise datacenters. VI3 does have rough edges, including the absence of 10-Gig support, but overall it’s a hit. About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology

Less understood is the path to achieving these gains. Once you’ve caught the consolidation bug, what’s really involved in making the move, both in terms of technical requirements and physical labor? And what kind of control do you have over the new environment? To find out, we brought the heavyweight champ of virtualization platforms, VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3), in for a deep look, subjecting the software and a supporting team of VMware engineers to one of our real-world, Fergenschmeir test scenarios.

[There’s much more to VI3 than we could fit into the space of this particular article. See also our take on important and even invaluable VI3 capabilities such as VM snapshotting and cloning, VMware’s consolidation planning tool, and how the virtualization wave is driving innovation above and below the hypervisor.]

In the end, VI3 and the VMware team passed our test with flying colors, successfully migrating a number of Windows and Linux systems and impressing us with a wealth of useful tools and automated management capabilities. We also discovered some curious limitations in VI3, however, that made our path to a virtual infrastructure a little less straightforward than it otherwise might have been.

Taking the Plunge
Our test began on a bright October morning. The first order of business was to pick a free blade in our Dell PowerEdge 1955 blade server chassis, install Windows Server 2003, join that server to the domain, and install VMware VirtualCenter Server. This installation was straightforward, with all requirement packages present on the install CD. Although there weren’t any Infrastructure 3 servers to manage yet, the groundwork was laid. Next, the first VI3 server was built on a second blade in the Dell cabinet.

Like its predecessor, VI3 is built on a Linux base, leveraging the stability and light footprint of a highly customized Red Hat operating system to provide foundation elements, but relying on a VMware kernel and VMware I/O drivers and schedulers, to squeeze the most out of the hardware. The Linux folks will immediately notice that the installer is unabashedly built on Red Hat’s Anaconda, and installation is generally as easy as booting the CD and clicking Next a few times, ensuring that the required I/O devices are discovered and configured. In the case of our Dell server, I/O was limited to one gigabit front-end NIC and one gigabit back-end NIC for iSCSI SAN interaction. Within a few minutes, the first VI3 server was booting, and the gathered geeks toasted the achievement with a brief swig of Red Bull.

VM Control Center
When the first VI3 server was up and running, we installed the VirtualCenter client on a Windows XP workstation. Unlike the management tools of previous VMware platforms, such as GSX Server, the VI3 management tool base is Windows-only, built on a .Net platform and requiring the most recent Microsoft build. Luckily, the installer detects the current version and prompts the user to download and install the latest release from Microsoft. After this task was completed, it was the work of a few seconds to add the VI3 server to the management console.

VI3 server management in VirtualCenter is based on the familiar hierarchical view of many Microsoft-based tools, and provides a reasonable amount of sorting and organizing options, including multiple views of the available host servers, virtual servers, and clusters and groups. In the case of our Fergenschmeir Ltd. test scenario, implementing a VMware cluster was the way to go, since the advanced features of VI3 such as HA (High Availability) and DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) require a clustered environment. Luckily, this is as easy as right-clicking on the datacenter name defined during installation and adding a new, empty cluster. After that’s done, new VI3 hosts are simply added to the cluster — no other configuration is necessary.

In order to use services such as HA, DRS, and VMotion, every VI3 server needs shared storage in one form or another. Fibre Channel and iSCSI SANs are supported, as is standard NFS, but NFS comes with a performance hit. We brought the cluster together by carving a 600GB LUN from the available storage pool on the EqualLogic SAN, and masked to permit access from the dedicated iSCSI NIC on the VI3 server.