Bare metal hypervisors: a group test

David Jones ZDNet Australia

Published: 01 Jun 2009

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Go to section: Introduction How we tested Accessibility Manageability Test results Summary

Product accessibility

Each product was assessed based on how easy it is to obtain and install.

Citrix XenServer
Downloading XenServer from Citrix is simple. After navigating to the XenServer product page, it's a simple matter of filling in some details before being directed to the XenServer download page. Two files are required, an INSTALL and LINUX ISO, totalling a little over a gigabyte.

Of all the hypervisor installations, XenServer was the simplest. It merely required booting the server from the install CD and following its prompts to enter details such as its IP address and server name. It should be very familiar to anyone who has installed Red Hat since the Domain 0 kernel is based on CENTOS. The install CD is then also used in a Windows machine to install the XenCenter management utility (not web-based). Within 10 minutes you're ready to start creating virtual machines.

VMware ESXi 3.5
VMware ESXi 3.5 is also simple to download from the VMware website. We created an install CD and the installation was straightforward. Screens are a little more polished than XenServer, reflecting this product's maturity. A web-based management console is installed on a windows machine from a separate download. The whole process takes a little longer than XenServer, but it's still easy for a novice to negotiate.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008
Hyper-V Beta R2 was used for this test since the release version was unable to recognise the latest Intel PRO Gigabit on-board NICs in the server, reporting 'No Network on Boot'. Unlike the previous two hypervisors that use a Linux-based kernel, Hyper-V is wrapped within an appliance version of Windows Server 2008 (in fact, Windows 7 Server for the Beta R2).

The download is easy, and installation of the hypervisor onto the server is also fairly straightforward. Configuration is done via a terminal screen, which launches once you're logged in. We found this a little tedious, with lots of options to understand and make selections from.

The Windows Hyper-V management console is an MMC snap-in, which needs to be installed on either a Windows 2008 Server or a Windows Vista machine running the administration tools (x86 or x64, along with RSAT) — XP is not supported. It took us some time to understand what was required to get this working. Updates had to be applied, and the TestLab staff were unable to get the virtual machine manager running on a Vista machine, which requires a significant amount of voodoo to get working, and is nothing short of painful.

We ended up installing Windows 2008 server in order to manage the Hyper-V server. Management of the Hyper-V server is not possible until the firewall is turned off, or several services cleared (either via remote MMC snap-in once you've set up remote administration properly, or the appropriate 'netsh' command at the command line). Once we were finally able to manage the Hyper-V server, it was possible to start creating virtual machines. Windows Server 2003 SP1 requires an update to SP2 followed by another (provided) update before Integration Services can be installed (Hyper-V's equivalent to Xen and VMtools).

 

Go to section: Introduction How we tested Accessibility Manageability Test results Summary

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