Re: [tlug] Xen advice, please

["Keith Bawden" <keith@example.com>]

On 1/11/07, mcooper <mcooper@example.com> wrote:
> On Jan 9, 2007, at 10:39 PM, Peter Van der Weeen wrote:
>
> > I can understand that the VMWare people are telling everyone you
> > should buy their expensive(!) software rather than using their free
> > Server/Player version :-)
> >
>
> I guess I should be a little more suspicious of their insistence that
> Server be used only for testing, not production. And VMWare is not
> just expensive. It costs more than twice the price of the hardware
> itself, even for good hardware.

I have not used the VMware ESX stuff so I cannot really comment on it
being a good buy or not. However I use VMware workstation (about 200
US dollars) and VMware Server (for testing, not production). These
coupled with the vmware player make for a very cost effective way to:

# Create and distribute VM appliances for internal testing.
# Create test server environments that mimic a production system.

I find having a smaller scale test environment of my production
servers on hand to be invaluable. I can break and restore things there
as much as I want before breaking the production servers :-)

Regards, Keith