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VMware to Make Server Product Free (as in beer)

Posted by Zonk on Fri Feb 03, 2006 08:35 AM
from the i-do-enjoy-a-good-free-server-product dept.
Operating Systems Software IT
yahyamf writes "CNET News.com is reporting that in the face of increasing competition in the OS virtualization market VMWare is going to give away its GSX server product for free, in the hope that customers who try it will eventually migrate to the more powerful ESX server. The company recently released a free VMWare Player which could only run but not create virtual machines. The company faces competition from rival products such as SWsoft's Virtuozzo, Mircrosoft's Virtual Server, as well as open source software like Xen"
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story

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[+] IT: VMWare Inc. Releases Free Virtual Machine Runtime 318 comments
rfinnvik writes "VMWare Inc. has released a new free (as in beer) virtual machine runtime called VMware Player. According to VMWare, this free VM runtime makes it possible for anyone to run virtual machines created in their Workstation, GSX or ESX products. It also runs virtual machines created in Microsoft's virtualization products. The runtime is available for both Windows and Linux."
[+] Ask Slashdot: Which OS Makes the Best VMWare Host? 141 comments
astrojetsonjr asks: "A few days ago, Trillian_1138 asked about running Linux on a laptop. Yagu started a thread suggesting the use of VMWare to allow running multiple flavors of Linux and Windows at the same time. Lots of readers then posted their success stories using VMWare . My primary machine is an IBM laptop and I'm getting ready to move to using VMWare to allow me run Linux, Solaris and Windows at the same time. First, what is the OS/distro with which you have had the best success hosting VMWare? Finally, what host OS install and setup tips do suggest?"
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  • hey don't leave out qemu (Score:3, Informative)

    by jomas1 (696853) on Friday February 03 2006, @08:41AM (#14634200) Homepage
    If you are going to list software that will let you run an operating system from within another don't leave out qemu ahref=http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/rel=url2 html-2228 [slashdot.org]http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/>

    Qemu may not run as fast as vmware does now but it's here, it's free and you can change whatever you want about it. The same is not true for vmware
    • I use QEMU everyday in my day job, so now I can boot my desktop in Linux... I use Delphi7 inside QEMU and it works flawlessly (not blazingly fast, but acceptable)
      • I used to run QEMU also but now that Vmware player is free I run that instead. As I am just an "end user" who do not really need to modify the code, I only use it to run Linux on my Windows computer.

        • Re:SECONDED (Score:4, Informative)

          by j0217995 (597878) on Friday February 03 2006, @09:47AM (#14634601)
          I use a combination of them as well to run Linux on my windows box. If you use qemu to create the image file in vmware format you can then setup any vmplayer file to run any operating system. Currently I have the following image files, Ubuntu (Breezy), Ubuntu (Dapper), Windows 2003 Server, Debian, and BSD. All files were created first in qemu then I installed through VMPlayer. Runs as well as an official VM Player file available for download. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VMwarePlayerAndQemu [ubuntu.com] for more information.
    • If you just want to run Linux under Windows, why not CoLinux [colinux.org]?

    • I use virtualization a lot, both at work and for for personal needs. I have got about 20 disk images, and my work typically requires me to run 2 or 3 virtual machines concurrently. Three or 4 years ago, I was using VMWare because it was basically the only product that worked well at the time. However I have switched to Qemu since then, because IMHO it is technically superior. Here is why:

      • Qemu copy-on-write disk image formats allows me to have as many different disk images of the same OS while using MU

        • Re:hey don't leave out qemu (Score:5, Informative)

          by birder (61402) on Friday February 03 2006, @09:10AM (#14634345) Homepage
          What are you talking about? VMware allows you to make the MAC address anything you want. Edit the config file and change the generatedAddress for the ethernet controller.

        • Re:hey don't leave out qemu (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Professor_UNIX (867045) on Friday February 03 2006, @09:26AM (#14634441)
          Why do proprietary fanatics think they need to be apologists for commercial software? Because VMWare produces some fantastic products. I couldn't care less if software is commercial or not as long as it fits my needs and my budget. There is simply no open source alternative to VMWare right now that even comes close to what it does at the speeds it does it. Quit being a blind open source fanatic and look around the world sometime. The vast majority of people have no problem paying for software if it fits their needs.
              • And what it makes to you that your os of choice (OS/2) have disapeared despite quite a fan base just because it was closed source ?

                What makes you think OS/2 was his OS of choice? It was only one of several that he listed.

                Don't you think that you should invest in non-closed source knowledge ?

                He ends his post by saying "I also support OSS that does a better job than commercial alternatives. It's about choice.". Did you even read it?

  • Mmm? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2006, @08:42AM (#14634202)
    So where can I find this free beer everyone keeps talking about?

  • Mircrosoft (Score:3, Insightful)

    by raffe (28595) * on Friday February 03 2006, @08:43AM (#14634206) Journal
    I bet this is more because og Mircrosoft than Xen. When Mircrosoft is moving into a field competitors usally shiver....

      • Re:Mircrosoft (Score:3, Insightful)

        by oni (41625)
        I can't speak for anyone else, but I have absolutely zero interest in Microsoft's VM products.

        Yeah, but the way the world works is that people who wouldn't normally even think about VMs will think about them for no other reason than the fact that it came for free with their OS. Microsoft will have a button somewhere labeled, "click here to make this a VM" and people who don't even know what a VM is will click it.

        Don't believe me? Take a look at the form that comes up after you install Win2k3 advanced ser

  • Intel VT (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lisaparratt (752068) on Friday February 03 2006, @08:46AM (#14634222)
    I would have thought the most scary thing facing VMware is Intel Virtualisation Technology - it makes what was previously very hard fairly simple. It also doesn't require the guest OSes to be hacked, ala Xen.

    I suspect we can expect to see a huge swathe of hypervisors being released over the next few months, if only so x86 Mac users can run Windows apps!

    • Re:Intel VT (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rfinnvik (16122) * on Friday February 03 2006, @08:52AM (#14634252)
      VMWare's real "killer app" in my opinion is VirtualCenter/VMotion. The management tool is better than anything else I've seen for managing virtual infrastructure - and the ability to move live VMs between hardware nodes is just impressive :)

      • Re:Intel VT (Score:4, Interesting)

        by jcnnghm (538570) on Friday February 03 2006, @09:37AM (#14634527)
        Xen can also move live VMs between hardware nodes (only non-responsive for tens of milliseconds). It's going to be a very powerful tool once all chips have virtualization capabilities.
      • The hard part of virtualising x86 is having to rewrite guest code on the fly to make sure it doesn't do anything that'd break it out of it's sand box. Vanderpool alleiviates the need to do this.

        This changes writing a hypervisor like VMWare from a very, very difficult challenge to just moderately taxing.

        This totally changes the landscape - VMWare won't be obsolete, it's just going to have an awful lot more competition in future. The few technical advantages it has over the competition are now handed to every

      • Re:Intel VT (Score:5, Informative)

        by TheRaven64 (641858) on Friday February 03 2006, @09:17AM (#14634388) Homepage Journal
        There are two parts to virtualisation:
        1. CPU virtualisation.
        2. Peripheral virtualisation
        The first of these is practically impossible on x86. VMWare and VirtualPC (x86 edition) manage it using some really, really, ugly hacks that kill performance (and then some more hacks to boost performance). Xen works by ignoring the problem. An operating system on Xen must be ported to not use any of the x86 instructions that don't easily allow virtualisation.

        The second is not very hard conceptually. You just need to do some kind of multiplexing and then expose your devices as if they are a fairly general device of the category. While this is conceptually simple, it is practically a lot of work. Again, Xen dodges the problem here slightly be requiring that the domain 0 OS supports the hardware, and then providing generic virtualisation routines for various categories of device (consumer VMWare and VPC do the same - not sure about the server lines).

        VT / Vanderpool / whatever make the first of these much easier (about as easy as it's been on RISC machines for the past decade or so and on mainframes for the past three. Yay for x86). They do very little for the second part of the puzzle. On PowerPC or SPARC, it might be possible to implement OpenFirmware drivers for hardware that are virtualisation-aware (IBM's servers do something a bit like this). I don't know if EFI has this capability; if it does then things like VMWare might become obsolete.

        Oh, the final part of the puzzle is clustering. Xen and the server-grade VM systems provide clustering support which allows virtual machines to be transparently migrated between cluster nodes. This is quite useful, since you can run N VMs on M machines, and squeeze the low-activity ones onto a small number of nodes, then have then migrated to their own node when they are under high load.

        • You're a bit misinformed about device virtualization, at least the way VMware does it.

          Devices aren't merely multiplexed. They're virtualized (or emulated, if you prefer that term.)

          What's the difference? For disks, the virtual machine doesn't see the actual disk controller or disk. It sees an emulated IDE or SCSI controller, and the virtual machine's disk storage is backed by a file in the host operating system. Reads and writes to the disk file go through normal Windows or Linux file APIs on the host.

  • What about existing customers? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tumutbound (549414) on Friday February 03 2006, @08:49AM (#14634237)
    I'd certainly be pissed off if I'd just paid $1400 for GSX only to be told this week it's free.
    I've been paying for regular updates to VMWorkstation over the years, does this mean I can stop and just use the free products?
    That said, it's still worth the money I've been paying.
    • Just imagine if you've just been done for downloading it off a p2p network and applying a cracked serial. That'd hurt. I'm not speaking from experience, just imagining...

    • Re:What about existing customers? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by meringuoid (568297) on Friday February 03 2006, @09:25AM (#14634434)
      I'd certainly be pissed off if I'd just paid $1400 for GSX only to be told this week it's free.

      Why? If you thought $1400 was too much for the product, you wouldn't have bought it. Since you bought the product, clearly you thought that what you were getting was worth more than what you were paying for it. So you were happy with the deal you made with VMware. Surely you are not petty enough to begrudge others the better deal that they are now getting?

      Though I'm certainly not the religious sort, I'm reminded of the Christian parable of the workers in the vineyard. You made your own deal with VMware, and you were happy with it. What business is it of yours if, since then, they have changed their plans and now offer better deals to others?

  • Limitations? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Comatose51 (687974) on Friday February 03 2006, @08:49AM (#14634240) Homepage
    This is not a troll comment but can it run on a cluster? Will it detect that it's running on a Linux cluster and refuse to run? Here's what I'm thinking, a bunch of older computers clustered using one of those Live CDs that make them part a cluster just by popping the CDs in. I believe the software, can't remember the name, also does single system image or something like that where the cluster appears as a single system to the applications. Then run VMWare on top and run any OS you want! In my scenario, I'll be running Windows because our software is written for Windows but takes forever to run. I've considered building a cluster but couldn't think of an easy way to make it run on Linux. I was going to try Xen but VMWare is super easy to use, if my experience using it on Windows carries over to Linux.

    Very exciting indeed.

    • I'm not so sure that shoehorning an app (and an OS for that matter) that thinks it's running on a signle node into a cluster is such a good idea. The benefits of a cluster are typically only realized when the underlying software has some idea of what's going on and can organize data sufficiently accross the nodes. At best case, I'm guessing there will be an awfully chatty system in place that may get marginally better performance or may even get worse performance than running the app on a single node.
    • "This is not a troll comment but can it run on a cluster?"

      No it's not troll, but it's totally uniformed. Currently SMP (multiprocessor/multithreaded) VMware is only supported on ESX server as an addon [vmware.com]. As ESX runs on bare hardware (it's GSX who runs as a Linux application), there is currently no support for "virtual multiple CPUs in Linux". (Xen does this, but it's not the issue now).

      Additionally OpenMOSIX (which comes with ClusterKnoppix [bofh.be] - I guess you meant this by "those Live CDs"), does not to "SMP like"

  • Strange thing to say ... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cablepokerface (718716) on Friday February 03 2006, @08:57AM (#14634282)
    in the hope that customers who try it will eventually migrate to the more powerful ESX server

    It's not only more powerful, it's fundamentally different. It's requires a different sort of administration. Also, the usage is different. gsx wil rarely be actively used in high uptime required production environments, esx will. esx also enables functionalities such als vmotion (if you have a san [wikipedia.org] that is) and will be used more often in blade server configs.

    I really wonder if people will view esx as an 'upgrade' to gsx.
  • To play devils advocate here, why isn't VMWare resorting to patents to muscle out the competition? Why compete when a government monopoly can take care of competition for you?

    Are all their patents pending?

    • Re:Why Not Use Patents? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Dr. Evil (3501) on Friday February 03 2006, @09:39AM (#14634541)

      VMWare is not in a good position to use patents to protect their IP.

      The reason being that they actually have a product. This means they can be countersued for things like using a drop down menu, displaying a rectangle on a screen, ingenious stuff like that.

  • Seems that GSX Server does everything VMWare Workstation does, so why would anyone buy VMware Workstation, when GSX Server is free? Don't quite understand that bit...

  • Wait a second.... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2006, @09:00AM (#14634302)
    Doesn't TFA say they are "expected" to make their product free?

    expected != will
  • VMWare is going to give away its GSX server product for free, in the hope that customers who try it will eventually migrate to the more powerful ESX server...Intel Virtualization Technology--code-named Vanderpool and now emerging in server processors--accelerates some operations and makes it possible to run Windows on Xen without modifications to Windows that otherwise would be necessary.

    I'm interested how the Intel Virtualization Technology will run on the up and coming SEX server.

  • Speculation (Score:3, Funny)

    by Simon (S2) (600188) on Friday February 03 2006, @09:02AM (#14634313) Homepage
    This is all news.com.com.com.com speculation. In TFA they state: "VMware may gain two advantages from the move..." blablabla "VMware didn't immediately respond to requests for comment."
    So the title "VMware to Make Server Product Free (as in beer)" is misleading at best.
  • This sounds to me like VMWare is under a lot of pressure. I'd hate to see them go away, because we use VMWare Workstation for some pretty important stuff, and the license cost isn't that bad in the grand scheme of things anyways.
  • . . . of much commercial value for long, given that the model of computing is headed for a TCPA/Palladium/Remote attestation/Client assurance/DRM lockdown. Emulating "trusted" computing would defeat the whole purpose of the "content" and computing industries' march towards that model. That, and they'll buy laws making even attempting such emulation punishable by just short of death.

  • Related Stories? (Score:3, Funny)

    by gmf (810466) on Friday February 03 2006, @09:27AM (#14634447)
    What is it with this "Related Stories" thing? Is that new, or why did I never notice it before?

    And most importantly: Will it also list the dupes? :)

  • You can make your own VMs for VMware player (Score:5, Informative)

    by soboroff (91667) on Friday February 03 2006, @09:32AM (#14634492)
    "The company recently released a free VMWare Player which could only run but not create virtual machines."

    Sure you can. Take a gander at http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000153064739/ [hackaday.com]

    What you don't get with VMware player is the nifty GUI to help you with the setup.

    • Re:Good Move! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jaseuk (217780) on Friday February 03 2006, @08:51AM (#14634249) Homepage
      GSX does all you need. So why if GSX is free would you need workstation?

      Jason.

      • Re:Good Move! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by jruschme (76180) on Friday February 03 2006, @08:57AM (#14634280) Journal
        Which leaves the even bigger question of where this all leaves Workstation?

        Player makes sense... small run-only environment, embeddable, etc.

        But if GSX goes free what would a pricy workstation offer?

      • I haven't compared them 1 to 1, but I would expect that GSX has higher requirements for your server, both memory and CPU wise. If that is not the case, you're absolutely right - GSX is all I'm going to need. One more positive side is that open sourcing GSX may trigger few separate public projects based on it (depends on what license GSX sources will be provided under).
        • q[One more positive side is that open sourcing GSX may trigger few separate public projects based on it (depends on what license GSX sources will be provided under).]q

          It's provided under the "here are the binaries; you may not reverse engineer them" license.

          Read the topic again -- free as in beer, not free as in speech. Just because I give you the beer for free doesn't mean I have to provide you the recipe.

        • Re:Good Move! (Score:5, Interesting)

          by jaseuk (217780) on Friday February 03 2006, @09:30AM (#14634474) Homepage
          Well the only major difference between GSX and workstation is that GSX allows you to control startup / shutdown of virtual machines so that they can start at windows boot, it also supports remote administration and I believe you can manage the machines through their other tools such as VirtualCentre. I don't believe there is any great difference in system requirements for GSX over Workstation.

          Ultimately GSX, Workstation and player are all essentially the same technology. ESX only differs by being a custom linux distribution making it very easy to install and a web interface to control operation and a few enterprise features such as VLANS and the VMotion addons. They've also moved some of the virtual machine I/O and handling into a kernel module rather than running in userland to gain some sort of performance advantage. Rather strangely ESX seems to be slow at supporting iSCSI. Of course there are also tools to limit bandwidth and control CPU usage on individual machines, whereas with GSX and Workstation it's a free for all.

          Personally after trialling VMWARE ESX and GSX I actually prefer GSX. The "grow on use" disk type available for GSX is certainly better for small single use servers, flexibility to grow and keeps image sizes down for backups. I also really miss the client CD-ROM and floppy support which again is absent from ESX. The control panel also seems quite flakey.

          Personally I feel that VMWARE have got the pricing structure wrong somehow. The only way to truely consolidate is to use big machines (20-30GB RAM) the problem here is that the cost of 4GB RAM modules is rather prohibitive, then add in some server redundancy and all the VMWARE licensing fees and it doesn't make sense any more. I'd actually prefer to pay a reasonable cost per active virtual machine, that way we can keep redundant hardware and move machines around as we see fit for performance or DR purposes.

          I'm quite keen for GSX to be free or cheap, it'll then make cost sense to consider a VMWare strategy.

          Jason.

      • Re:Good Move! (Score:4, Informative)

        by jbarr (2233) on Friday February 03 2006, @09:42AM (#14634567) Homepage
        jaseuk wrote:
        "GSX does all you need. So why if GSX is free would you need workstation?"

        According to the Data Sheets found here:

        http://www.vmware.com/pdf/gsx_specs.pdf [vmware.com]
        http://www.vmware.com/pdf/ws_specs.pdf [vmware.com]

        GSX requires a "server" host, while Workstation does not:

        GSX:
        Host Operating Systems
        Runs on Microsoft Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server; Windows Server 2003, Web, Standard, Enterprise and x64 Editions, and Linux server host OSes

        Workstation:
        Host Operating Systems
        Windows 2000 Professional and Server, Windows XP (32- and 64-bit), Windows Server 2003 (32- and 64-bit)
        Popular 32-bit Linux distributions from Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu and Mandrake; select RHEL and SLES 64-bit

        -Jim Barr
        http://jimstips.com/ [jimstips.com]

      • Re:Good Move! (Score:4, Informative)

        by paradizelost (689394) on Friday February 03 2006, @09:44AM (#14634577) Homepage
        Multiple Snapshots. GSX Does not have them, workstation does. and let me tell you, It's damn nice.

    • Re:WTF (Score:5, Informative)

      by civilizedINTENSITY (45686) on Friday February 03 2006, @03:09PM (#14637261)
      What the fuck does "free as in beer" mean?

      It used to be that on election day the political machines would send men out to all the bars to buy everyone beer to toast their candidate. The idea was that the free beer would lead them to vote for the guy. Since there is an implied obligation to vote their way, the beer wasn't really free. This is then contrasted (in the "free as in beer or free as in speech") to freedom of speech, which is obviously a different sort of "free". Likewise, "Live Free or Die" doesn't imply life without cost, but rather the cost of living free.

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