What recommendations would you give for implementing VMware Server, not ESX

I can't afford VMware infrastructure to do all the cool things, but I also don't have the money to buy a physical server for each and every machine I need, so I've been implementing some non-core machines with VMware Server.

I'm interested in hearing about what other people do with this, and if it's a long-term viable solution, or if I'm just postponing the inevitable migration to ESXi

I ran VMWare Server (1.0x, then 2) for 18 months before ESXi came out free. I did the gamut of performance tuning tricks but was never truely happy with VM performance in Server. Systems that do alot of context switching / handle many network connections are not well suited for Server when ESXi is out there for free.

As long you have a backup solution for ESXi, it is a far better solution. My VM's sit out on NFS running on LVM on top of 15K SAS Raid10. I do 'in VM file' file backups and snapshot backups at the LVM level for the images on the NFS server.

I was not able to run MS Exchange, MS SQL Server, or even a MS File & print server under VMWare Server with acceptable results. Under ESXi they hum right along. Linux VMs enjoy the same level of improvement as well.

The other comments here are great as well - no need to retype.

Jeff

i'm running mix of esxi and vmware servers under debian linux. i dont have san, just raided local drives, my biggest concern is 'backupubility', i dont need very high performance nor i suffer from some slowdowns [ at least until now ]. all runs under mix of dell poweredge 1950 and poweredge 2950.

for hosts running under esxi i run partial backups from within virtual machines, no rocket science here, all works well and in stable fashion.

for vmware server - i keep virtual machines on lvm partition and use lvm snapshot feature for 'hot backups' [ that is - without interrupting virtual machines ]. i DO KNOW that this is unsupported mechanism that can lead to unrecoverable backups but with additional backups from within vm guests - i feel comfortable with that thought. also so far i've recovered complete vms dozens of times without any problems.

for vmware server i've done some host and guest tuning:

• vmware keeps it's temporary files on /dev/shm
• i've turned off memory trimming / over-committing for guests
• i keep vmware tools installed under guests
• for linux guests i've elevator set to noop, kernel clock set to no_hz
• i've done some common-sense optimization for windows guests including turning off unnecessary services, disabling screensavers and hibernation etc.

i'm quite happy with the setup. i'm using vmware server since v 1.0 without much hiccups. i've noticed that usage on host system of vm with 2003 grows steadily over time. reboot of vm does not solve the problem so every ~2 months i shut down such vm completly and boot it up again. symptoms suggest it's problem with vmware rather than windows itself.

but it all depends on your workload, in my case i have quite lo disk i/o requirements for guests, this is performance bottleneck that i expect to hit sooner or later.

hardware advice? all depends on workload; take:

• 1x quad core or 2x quad cores
• plenty of memory [ 16-32 GB are cheap nowadays ]
• if you need io - take 4-8 disks in raid 10