I’ve become a big fan of Vmware in recent months. I was originally turned off to Virtualization products because of my experiences with Microsoft’s initial versions of Virtual Server (Now “System Center Virtual Machine Manager). I found the solution to have too much host resource overhead, as well as incompatibility issues with non-Microsoft Operating Systems.

Back a few years, my infrastructure was 100% Microsoft-based. As I’ve gotten older and more knowledgeable, I’ve moved to a point where my infrastructure is about 50% Microsoft and 50% Linux. Linux software is free, plus, the management cost and overhead of hosting simple webpages is greatly reduced by hosting these non-.Net sites on a linux machine.

I started experimenting with Vmware a few months ago, and have achieved successful results in virtualizing 80% of my hardware. In doing this, a problem arose with the new version of Windows Server 2008 R2. I’m mainly using this version for my domain controllers. I noticed that when I installed the software, the VM’s were a bit unstable and prone to freezing. The machine template in Vmware was listed as “Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 (experimental). Even after loading Vmware Tools, and using the updated NIC driver (a solution that I found on the Vmware community forums) I still had problems with sluggishness and freezing.

I was happy to learn that, after the OS has been on the market for 6 months, Vmware has finally patched up ESX and moved Server 2008 R2 out of the “experimental” category. Build 208167 now releases official support of this as well as Windows 7 32 and 64-bit. I’ve noticed that after updating ESX and installing the new version of the Vmware Tools, I’ve had a modest performance improvement. We will continue to monitor the situation and report our continuing results.