Advantages of ESXi vs. Workstation 9

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I have been using VMware Workstation for many years, and I was always very pleased with its features and the stability. Now that I needed to run more and more servers continuously, I looked into ESXi 5. From what I read on the website, ESXi seemed to be very well tailored for my setup.

So I bought certified hardware, with a Adaptec 6805TQ raid adapter, and got ESXi5 running. Initially, I was pleased because all I needed was a USB stick and a free version of ESXi.

Then the user experience degraded quickly...

- The 5.0.0-update1 broke auto start of VMs. First of all, who comes up with those version numbers? Then, how can it be that such a feature is not tested prior to the update rollout? It is an essential feature, rendering the whole virtual server idea useless...

- Importing and Exporting of VMs is slow. With gigabit connectivity, I could not get more than 30-40MByte/sec throughput.

- Extremely limited command line tools, that make backups, administration and updating more painful then necessary.

- Adaptec provides drivers for VMware, and I heard rumors saying that up to ESXi 4 they were useful. Now, the driver just provides the possibility to use the storage space, but hardly anything more. I had to manually write scripts to monitor hard disk health and RAID status, because the regular adaptec utilities did not work woth VMware ESXi 5. I was assured by Adaptec that they were working on this, but there has not been a driver update since may 2012. Currently, the only thing I can do after a simple disk failure is to reboot the server and fiddle with the Adaptec BIOS to get things fixed.

- Waiting desperately for ESXi 5.1, I tried to update my system, but the installer crashed at 80% (I/O Error, probably a problem with the USB stick). So I did a new clean install and manually crafted all my patches into the system (i.e., firewall settings, backup scripts, RAID monitoring). Besides a working autostart feature, all I got from ESXi 5.1 was a lot of trouble.

Now I have just found out, that the "shared virtual machines" feature of Workstation 8 and 9 does basically everything that I need, and far more than ESXi:

- run a bunch of VMs on a server

- ability to start and stop them remotely (command line, workstation UI)

- working autostart (ok, needs command line scripting)

- proper backup tools

- good hardware monitoring

- better RAID driver support (i.e., hot-swap)

- better network performance (hard to believe, since ESXi's main selling point is the bare metal hypervisor)

- persistent storage of all settings, i.e., firewall settings

- better multimedia performance

- web interface (killer feature for remote management)

- runs on any hardware, so in case my certified ESXi hardware fails, I can just grab a powerful workstation and use that.

So now I am trying to decide whether I should dump all the ESXi stuff and just run debian linux with Workstation 9. Most google results and some articles here in the community are biased towards ESXi for servers, but currently I can hardly see _any_ advantages of ESXi, besides better storage pool usage.

Am I missing something obvious or is my use case just better served by Workstation? I am happy for all kinds of feedback!

Regards

Thomas

[louyo]

Well, ignoring the rants, my comments are as follows.

We run 2 ESXi servers, one for testing and one production. The production system has been running 4 VM's for over a year, the only shut down was from a long term power outage. When the power came on, they all rebooted.

I use Workstation for development/testing, running on a Linux host. I have converted a couple of VM's so they can run on the Workstation in an emergency (one VM is our voicemail/PBX management system).

If you have VM's that need to run 24/7, I would recommend ESXi, no worries if someone logs off or restarts the workstation (although you can work around this by connecting with RDP), some Linux updates require a restart.

OTOH, if your hardware does not properly support ESXi, you might be better off running something else. There are several alternatives that you can consider.

We are still running ESXi 4.1 on the production system, have not seen a need to update. It "ain't broke" so I am not going to fix it.

When I go to the VMUG meetings and stand up and tell what our usage is, everyone looks at me and wonders "who is the little kid in the short pants" . Most run dozens of servers with hundreds of VM's.

Lou