[NTLUG:Discuss] VMware ESXi or Xen?

[Chris Cox]

Neil Aggarwal wrote:
> Hello:
> 
> I am thinking of starting to set up virutal machines
> for customers on shared servers.  These will mostly
> be used for web and database servers.
> 
>>From my limited investigations so far, I can see
> two main products available for free:
> 1. The Xen kernel distributed with CentOS 5.3
> 2. VMware ESXi server

kvm?

CentOS 6 will use kvm instead of Xen as its
primary hypervisor choice.

> 
> It looks like both support paravirtualized Linux
> guests, Windows server, etc.

Yes... sort of.  VMware support VMI enabled
guests (paravirtualized)... NEW (and I mean new) kernels will
have the support but it's buggy.  SLES 10's
implementation is relatively stable... and
rock solid with 1 processor (though personally
I haven't seen an issue with a smp guest using
SLES 10 under VMware).

Windows afaik isn't paravirtualized except for
its own hypervisor or for SLES Xen (due to the "evil"
partnership with Novell).  Somebody feel free
to correct me... things change.


> 
> Any opinions on the pros/cons of each?

Xen is ok... I think kvm is the future, Xen will
probably die in the long run.  VMware is king and
just like folks looking for an "iPhone killer", I
don't see one out there yet.  ESXi isn't quite
ESX since it's missing the Red Hat built-in
console... and we were discussing that at the last
meeting... how to you enable things like snmp
and vnc, etc. for ESXi since their is no Red Hat
(we're thinking those features are just unusable).
It's possible that some weird vmware api command
can edit a file, etc... not sure.