…use VMWare Server 1.0!!!!
Our friend Jorge contacted me about something he ran into in Longhorn (LH) which reminded me that I had a LH server mid-build on a Virtual Server 2005 R2 (VSR2) instance. I had started it but it was taking so damn long I went on to other things and eventually work stuff completely overtook any thoughts of working on anything new… So anyway, I get reminded that it is there and tell it to finish the install. So then I also start, on the same machine, the config for a LH server running under VMWare Server 1.0 (VMWS).
After the LH install completes on VSR2, I install the guest additions and check some things out and man it is slow… So I install the for Vista Beta 2 additions that you can get through connect.microsoft.com in the VSR2 SP1 beta. Still dog slow. I figure eh, it is beta, I guess I have to expect it. Then I tell it to start the Windows Update process, there are some 10 patches it wants to load. As it does that, I fire up the LH install on VMWS. I happen to peek at taskman to check out how the processor is being divied up as I expect VMWS is probably pounding the crap out of the machine during the LH load because that is what happened on VSR2… Holy cow was I surprised… VSR2 is showing 70% utilization and VMWS is showing about 12%…. I look at the screens to see what they are doing and VSR2 is downloading the 10 updates (something like 8MB or so) and VSWS is copying and then expanding files… I shouldn’t have to tell you those utilization numbers are completely backwards from what they should be….
Get this… in the time it took for VSR2 to install those updates… I loaded LH Beta 2 on VMWS… When I told VMWS to get the 10 LH updates, it did it in less than 2 minutes. Again through all of this, processor utilization was lower with VMWS than VSR2.
I knew I was going to have to use VMWS just to support testing of Exchange 12 due to the x64 requirement, but man, I didn’t think it would be so much incredibly faster for LH testing as well. In fact, I expected just the opposite. Microsoft knows exactly what is changing in LH, you would expect that their VSR2 additions would run gangbuster speed compared to VMWS. But no… to put this in animal terms… VMWS is running around the room like a Chinchilla on speed and VSR2 is running around the room like a hungry Guinea Pig that found a nice pile of fresh Oxbow timothy hay.
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 joe
Hi joe,
The install of the 5384 LH build took about 30 min or less on VMWare Workstation 5.1.2. The first time I saw that was like: WOW!
Beta1 was as slow as sh!t flowing through a thin pipe 😉
jorge
I’ve just been plain impressed with VMWS in general. Seems just as responsive as our ESX VMs. So I think we’ve pretty much decided not to renew our ESX licenses for our lab environment. We were also looking forward to x64 VMs, but they require a VT-enabled chip on the Intel side. Don’t have one of those yet 🙁
Jorge:
Agreed… wow.
Dave:
Hey Dave, if I was still there I would push to get a VMTN subscription… It is like MSDN but gives you everything from VMWARE for test environments including the ability to build “playable” images which would be useful for the testlab folks. Check out
http://www.vmware.com/products/vmtn/
You can still use the 32 bit version of Exchange 2007 for testing though if you don’t have 64 bit hardware yet… I fall into that category.