On 6/28/2010 10:15 AM, Warren Young wrote:
On 6/28/2010 7:59 AM, guillaume wrote:
Why would one use vmware Server 2.x when ESXi is available free of charge, stable, small footprint, ... ?
I've thought about it, but it's not really the right thing for us.
Our VM host has some special hardware in it, driven by custom software which runs just fine in the host OS, but which doesn't work through virtualization because VMware doesn't know about this class of hardware.
What kind of hardware? Is it something that could be replaced by a supported card or a usb device that a guest could access?
This server is idle much of the time, so it made sense to give it secondary duty as a VM host. To switch to ESXi, we'd have to bring up a separate server (wasteful) and let the current one go back to being idle much of the time (doubly wasteful).
That still leaves the Server 1.x version as an option. It's been rock solid for me for years and the only thing that RHEL/Centos5 being 'unsupported' hosts means is that after each kernel update you have to run the script that recompiles the kernel module - which is not a problem as long as you have the compiler and kernel header packages installed.