Comments on: VMware vSphere: Out of the Box and into the Clouds http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7315/ Open Source, Open Standards Sat, 05 Oct 2013 13:48:18 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 By: kendonoghue http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7315/#comment-6380 kendonoghue Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7315/#comment-6380 Like so many others, the author took the VMware FT story hook, line and sinker. At best, this is fault tolerant lite. FT is usually equated with mission critical applications. That being the case, and most users wanting to benefit from advances in multi-core, users should be concerned that applications running in VMware FT are limited to a single core, i.e. there is no SMP support. Also, there are issues re latency, overhead, inability to root-cause problems, propagation of errors to other servers. The list of configuration requirements to use VMware FT runs over two pages and is worth reading. Not to mention, multiple identical servers are required -- three is advised -- which means multiple licenses for application and OS (three servers to support such lightweight applications!). Lastly, this is a rev 1 product; would you commit your "most important applications" to a rev 1 product? Like so many others, the author took the VMware FT story hook, line and sinker. At best, this is fault tolerant lite. FT is usually equated with mission critical applications. That being the case, and most users wanting to benefit from advances in multi-core, users should be concerned that applications running in VMware FT are limited to a single core, i.e. there is no SMP support. Also, there are issues re latency, overhead, inability to root-cause problems, propagation of errors to other servers. The list of configuration requirements to use VMware FT runs over two pages and is worth reading. Not to mention, multiple identical servers are required — three is advised — which means multiple licenses for application and OS (three servers to support such lightweight applications!). Lastly, this is a rev 1 product; would you commit your “most important applications” to a rev 1 product?

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