When I was planning the infrastructure for my revitalized lab, I intended to have VMware play a central role in my network and application testing. While that objective was eventually met, it didn't turn out like I had planned, and the path was extremely circuitous, involving multiple changes in strategic direction. Now with the recent release of VMware ESX 3.0 and VMware Server 1.0 (a replacement for the GSX line), I'm having to revisit the decisions all over again.
I need to be able to run a wide variety of systems so that I can test network applications and protocols across a large number of platforms. VMware provides a great platform for that kind of work. For instance, I might need to look at the way that different operating systems implement a specific technology within their networking stacks, while another project might require me to compare the security protocols that are offered by a handful of e-mail servers. This kind of work is a natural fit for VMware, since it lets me avoid having to buy and manage a dozen different PCs that are all running different operating systems.
Originally my plan was simply to use the top-of-the-line VMware ESX 2.5 platform for this. Even though it's a little bit overkill for my expected usage, its performance and management features make it clearly superior to the mid-tier GSX platform, and also promise to translate into better overall testing.
In particular, whereas GSX runs as a system service under Windows or Linux, and thus relies on the operating system to provide basic file I/O and memory management, ESX employs an independent microkernel that manages these types of resources directly, giving it much better performance (ESX does use Linux for the "console" and some rudimentary system services, but the important stuff is handled by ESX directly). Another benefit to ESX is that it exposes system-management interfaces via a local /proc interface and also through SNMP, while the only management interface for GSX is a relatively limited WMI performance counter, and that's only available if Windows is used for the host operating system.
I knew that ESX had some peculiarities that would take some effort to overcome. For example, I knew that direct hardware management translated to stricter hardware requirements, and that using a relatively niche platform meant having less packaged software available. I also knew that ESX supported fewer guest operating systems than GSX. But I figured I could overcome these hurdles, and even if it took more up-front time to get things working, in the end it would take less time and energy than trying to manage multiple PCs. I was wrong on all these counts.
