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.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com