Category: Virtualisation

Cost comparison of Google Apps versus Self-Hosting

Posted by – July 11, 2010

I’ve just created the following spreadsheet that compares the annual cost of standard email hosting versus that of Google Apps. Note that this assumes my own employer’s hosting costs based around a decent sized virtual private server with fully managed support (that is, we look after the OS). Costs and level of support will obviously vary between different hosting company. Zimbra will happily run on a CentOS operating system which costs nothing. Similarly for cPanel/WHM.

One thing to bare in mind is that running your own server will allow you greater flexibility to run PHP, ASP, Perl, Ruby on Rails web sites or whatever you like on the same server as your email (although I always recommend service separation wherever possible). Also bare in mind that although Google offers email and telephone support, using a smaller company for your hosting usually provides you with a faster response and most often your hosting provider’s support are also the company systems administrators who can fix more complex problems on the go whereas Google may have to raise issues with engineering. Google Apps is also proprietary – data stored in cPanel/WHM, Zimbra and even MDaemon can easily be exported and migrated with ease (although email data can be exported from Google Apps via the IMAP or POP3 protocols). Google Sites data cannot yet be easily exported.

None of the costs shown below do not include VAT.


Click to enlarge

The Mac Virtualisation Fight – Round 4: VMware Fusion 3.1 versus Parallels Desktop

Posted by – June 10, 2010

Updated: 8:40am 11/06

Eagle-eyed readers to this blog will have already read three other posts (which I deleted due to being thoroughly pissed off with Parallels for taking advantage of my good nature) relating to the performance of two products from two virtualisation heavyweights of the PC and Mac world. For a while, things went rather quiet as Parallels Desktop 5 was released and pummelled VMWare Fusion 3.0.x into the ground.

Then VMware Fusion 3.1 was released. And it shows some fighting spirit. On my mid-2008 white Macbook (Intel GMX3100) Fusion 3.0.x ran like treacle. Graphics performance was exceptionally poor, and overall virtualisation performance was dire. Parallels, on the other hand, ran beautifully. I was all set to buy Parallels Desktop 5 when one of their representatives got in touch and pummelled me for information (and rather rudely I thought) and consequently published any findings on the Parallels blog without notifying me. I do not endorse products unless I am happy to do so and have been asked as a matter of courtesy, and having had Parallels give me (and others) the run around on version 3 stating that this feature will be included in version 3, that feature will be included in version 3, only to discover that no, these features will be incorporated into version 4 – a paid upgrade – I wasn’t particularly happy with their latest behaviour. I upgraded to version 3 from version 2 because of the noises being made about future inclusions into version 3. I did, eventually, reluctantly upgrade to version 4 in preparation for version 5. And then Parallels buggered my plans by taking advantage of me with regards to my blog entries. So I didn’t pay to upgrade to 5, and I haven’t used version 4 for many months – choosing to use Oracle VirtualBox instead. Performance isn’t as good, but it’s free and does what I need to do reasonably well.

During all of this, I haven’t paid to upgrade to Fusion 3 due to the poor performance and lack of VMWare’s dedication to the Mac platform. They have admitted they have a small team, and found that I could not commit funds while performance is still poor. That said, Fusion 3.1 is now performing very adequately on my rapidly aging Macbook – Aero doesn’t slow anything down and it just works. But Fusion doesn’t seem to remember Windows positions and I have to manually drag a Fusion 3.1 window to my liking every single time I start the Windows VM.

But could it? I’m currently re-visiting the Parallels camp again to compare Parallels against Fusion and I still believe Parallels has the performance edge.

Perhaps Parallels (and VMware for that matter) should switch to an annual subscription method. You pay ~$50 or so and get unlimited updates (minor AND major releases) throughout the year(s) you’ve subscribed. You can use the software indefinitely, but would only be able to download whatever is the latest release at the time of your active subscription. I think that would be a far fairer system for consumers, and would generate revenue for both companies. Works well enough for most other software I have.

What’s annoyed me throughout all of this testing is that Mac virtualisation still feels highly experimental and us consumers are the guinea pigs. I’m not sure who to blame for all of this – Apple, VMware or Parallels – I can only hope that it matures like the PC virtualisation market. The Mac is a highly versatile platform and it’d be a shame to see it flounder.

Updates, etc.

Posted by – May 13, 2009

Have just returned from two weeks away. 

We set off to Dubai for a week before heading to Tobago for another.  Photos of which can be found here (Dubai) and here (Tobago).  I'm in the process of sorting out the video, but here are a couple of simple shots taken from the Dubai Mall: Bagpipes, Dancers, Carnival.  Jennifer and I both had a wonderful time, and it's regretful that we're now stuck with rain all week after two weeks of glorious sunshine.

Work-wise, I've taken delivery of a Dell XPS M1730 laptop that consists of a 2.80Ghz Core 2 Extreme processor (overclockable through BIOS to 3.4Ghz), 6Gb RAM, 640Gb disk space (2 x 320Gb 7,200RPM hard drives in hardware RAID 0), Blu-Ray reader AND writer, 2 x NVIDIA 9800M GT 512Mb graphics cards in SLI configuration.  It's a wonderful system except that bloody Dell have supplied both a 7,200RPM 16Mb cache hard drive and a 5,400RPM 8Mb cache HD instead of two 7,200RPM drives.  What's even worse is that the primary drive is the slower 5,400RPM model.  I'm also a bit miffed that although they supply 800Mhz DDR2 memory, but the chipset only supports up to a maximum of 667Mhz thereby squeezing more money out of the punter who sees no additional benefit. 

Generally it's a very impressive rig, but it's let down by Dell's incompetence.
Am awaiting the arrival of Adobe Creative Production Premium suite for Windows to go with the laptop as I'm in the process of doing a lot of video editing and encoding for work at the moment.  The irony of this is that Adobe After Effects includes software from my previous employers who made me redundant.
My boss, Kate Craig-Wood, is interviewed by CNBC here which features me in a cameo appearance as "engineer who plugs in SSD drive into server".  Speaking of Memset, we have some very, very good miniserver pacakges at the moment.  Prices are incredibly competitive in my opinion.

Cross-platform virtualisation goodness: Virtualbox

Posted by – March 26, 2009

I'm currently evaluating Virtualbox, a project being managed by Sun Microsystems, that offers free and open source enterprise-level virtualisation.

While I love VMware Fusion, I am looking to go back to Windows (as I should be getting a Windows-based laptop from work to do various projects on – all of which I can't mention, but am very excited about) and having just seen the prices of VMware Workstation and comparing that against Fusion, I can safely rule out running Workstation as it is far too costly.  Yes, there is VMWare Player and a way of generating the VMX config files, but there are features in Workstation that are nice to have.

So today I've been trying out Windows Vista, 64-bit, under Virtualbox on my Macbook.  I have to say it runs exceedingly well, enough for it to replace Fusion and also enough for me to use during SquirrelSave tests.  I will be able to copy the VM images over to Windows as need be and not pay for an expensive VM license.

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