Vmware is more powerfull with a lot of tools. Xenserver can be setup on any hardware, easy to use and FREE Now it depends on what you look for. If you are a big enterprise, use vmware.
Xen & XenServer is the most powerful and complete virtualisation hypervisor. It requires more skill and knowledge, but on the other hand it's free and lets you do anyting (how about live migration of diffrent kinds of OSses and instance types between multiple servers? Or automatic scaling?) as long als you know what you are doing. VMware is the easy solution. It lets you do a few things, costs a lot of money and if you want to change something .. well you can't. If you are small/hobbyist, use XEN or the VMware player, if you are medium, do whatever knowledge you have. In the case of the large enterprise, use the product dat does what you need and nothing more/less, at the lowest cost. Make sure it's scalable, and make sure the sysadmins know how to use the infrastructure you so carefully designed. If they don't, fire them or have them study. The big labels don't always make the best products. For example, people argue that a server OS with a GUI is cool because they can use a mouse, but in reality, you need an OS without a GUI, with complete control, and the smallest footprint possible. It doesn't have to be easy, but it does need to work.
In Vmware terms it is called HA (High Availability) with VMotion & SMotion, DRS (Dynamic Resources Scheduling) & ofcourse it is available with ESX 3.x / vSphere 4.x sebus
You have XENMOTION which is equivalent to Vmotion Essentiel package for XEN has equivalent features with Vsphere
That is good to know, thanks One days I might even give it a go, just to see... Can it run on baremetal? sebus
Yes, it does baremetal. Dom0 usually is a modified (xenified) linux kernel, but you can remove almost everything except hardware initialization, and have the privileged OS as a veeery small OS. Xen itself is bare metal, and initializes before everything else. In theory, even the NT kernel can be a Dom0, if we had the sources.
I am doing initial research on getting a 64-bit capable PC and use VMs to make use of all the additional memory rather than installing Windows 7 x64. The reason being I have a few devices that don't have 64-bit drivers so I'm stuck in using XP or Server 2003. I had thought all the hypervisors don't allow direct hardware access and would require either VNC or Remote Desktop to access them but it appears newer versions of Xen will do what I want. Am I mistaken? Basically, I want to have my main VM perform desktop functions like playing videos and things like that, but not necessarily to play games, although having the ability to do that would be nice. I just saw a posting about the latest ATi patches and it appears to be still a work in progress. Has anyone had any experiences with them? Would nVIDIA cards be better? I've read some documents on installing Xen and it appears it piggy backs off of a Linux installation. Is there some recommended values for the memory one needs to allocate to Dom0? 256MB? What about the Linux installation partitions? I would think maybe a 32GB partition would be enough--including swap? Would having something like a Radius server installed in Dom0 be recommended or create a "services" VM to handle those things? My initial though is for security it would be better to separate them; but that's another distribution to sync up and update.
Xen dom0 doesn't need that much, I actually run them on a ~10GB SSD (cheap!) and have it release almost all PCI(e) devices. I give it a veth and a ttyS, and leave it until Xen needs an upgrade. Next, you create a domU configuration of your liking, give it whichever devices you require (like the video card, a SATA controller, some USB controllers, maybe a physical network device, or a virtual one) and as much RAM as you need. Make sure it autostarts, and BOOM you have a computer that will let you boot into whichever domU in 30 seconds from power on. I seems, however, that you don't have a lot of experience, so you might want to use VirtualBox instead. It's free, does Windows (yuk) and doesn't require the user to know anything.
VMware ESXi/ESX used bare-metal hypervisor,which are better performance than Xen, which Xen you can use embedded hypervisor system,which better than
prescolt, your post is useless. It doesn't make sense, the language is uninterpretable. ESXi/ESX is more like a lame-ass version of Xen with a crappy GUI. Xen gets you bare-metal speed and if you slim down your linux distro, it's your own experience that makes it a bare metal hypervisor, a full blown desktop OS with a couple of guests in it, or a virtualisation server. Xen = Power Other VT-d hypervisors = Lame/Incomplete/Dysfunctional crap
johnkeates, I see you also expressed your very personal opinion above about Other VT-d hypervisors! The question is almost like "What is better? Apples or pears? Each does the virtualization well, each allows use one hardware & run many VM on top. Each does the job: On previous page you summarized perfectly: "...In the case of the large enterprise, use the product dat does what you need and nothing more/less, at the lowest cost. Make sure it's scalable, and make sure the sysadmins know how to use the infrastructure you so carefully designed. If they don't, fire them or have them study..." sebus
hi johnkeates, i have VSphere in use and the performance seems to be good. Vsphere is based on modified RedHat same like XEN, where is the difference? Maybe you can explain where are the benefit of XEN and what Components are needed to work like VMWare-Product VSphere 4 ? Thanks