I have just been getting my feet wet with virtualization. I have played with VirtualBox and KVM on hosts running CentOS and Debian. I have also used VMWare a little bit in the past in a professional environment.

In a separate post of mine, someone suggested XenServer as it's used in professional environments. I'm just trying to learn things now at home but I do work in technology professionally so it makes sense to me to work on things that can translate to my career.

It seems like XenServer is it's own operating system, is that correct? If I want to use it , I would have to wipe my Debian base system correct? I have also seen that there is Xen Tools. Is that something that I could just install on my current Debian system and give me the same VM experience that I would with a XenServer? I don't mind blowing away my current server to install XenServer if I think it will be beneficial in the long run but my one concern is that my Debian server is also hosting some Samba shares that are usb drives attached to the physical server. Would XenServer by able to run Samba and share they usb drives? If not would a VM running on XenServer be able to do it?

I've done much more reading on Xenserver. I like the idea of it and the fact that I would be using a tool that is in wide use at big companies. I don't like the fact that it seems that you need to have a Windows computer to run XenCenter. I have dumped all Windows machines in my home environment a while ago but I guess I could install a virtual windows machine on my laptop just to run XenCenter