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ESXi is a paid enterprise solution. You can have a sixty day evolution period, but after that, you will need to buy a (expensive) license. Go with Xen or Oracle VirtualBox.
I just Recommended XenServer. In company we have some VmWare ESXi but we migrated them to XenServer. Citrix XenServer is very fast and working very nice. I love Xen.
For home VMs I use Virtualbox - both on Windows and in Xubuntu. You can run it headless too and performance seems to be good partly because it has some quite advanced hardware support which gives you a very nice experience on the guest OS. Another advantage for me is that at work we use VMWare and Virtualbox can run the exact same VMDK virtual disks (which I keep on external drives) - I can literally shut down a VM on VMWare, plug the disk into my Xubuntu machine and run the same VM in Virtualbox.
People tend to ignore Virtualbox for business use often - I am sure there are good reasons although I have none myself. Certainly for ease of setup at home, it is hard to beat.
I Agree. I use VirtualBox too and it is easy to use and so Sexy.
For Enterprise I just recommended XenServer, It is Very Powerful and high speed. My suggestion is Please Test it if you had not and if you test it then you thinking about Remove Vmware
---------- Post added 05-05-15 at 09:49 AM ----------
I Agree. I use VirtualBox too and it is easy to use and so Sexy.
For Enterprise I just recommended XenServer, It is Very Powerful and high speed. My suggestion is Please Test it if you had not and if you test it then you thinking about Remove Vmware
I'm looking into virtualizing, if nothing else to learn. Would like a pfsense router and a minecraft server running virtual on one box. And whatever else I can come up that is worth virtualizing.
I prefer open source so naturally I'm looking at Xen on top of Debian. However I see many always talking about ESXi.
What are the pros / cons to each? Xen seems to be cli only which I'm comfortable with as I can ssh in and run headless. Haven't looked at ESXi yet as I don't know if I could launch a VM with it to see what it's all about ( Don't know the settings to use in VirtualBox. )
ESXi is mostly closed source so it won't be what you prefer anyway.
I use ESXi extensively and KVM
I would say KVM is not as feature rich as ESXi, however it matured a lot lately, and I am very happy with it running on OpenSUSE. I've also an arch linux server with KVM but opensuse seems to perform better.
ESXi on the other hand is really an amazing hypervisor, it has tons of features and configuration options for each VM, but it really is for the enterprise. For a home lab KVM is perfect.
Hyper-v...well no thanks.. it's MS
XEN - good enough but it's lost the open source hypervisor battle to KVM.
Hyper-V actually works well for Linux (and Windows of course) guests. RHEL (and presumably CentOS) comes these days with modules designed to work well in Hyper-V guests.
I didn't pick Hyper-V here but have not been as appalled as I thought I would be after using it for more than a year.
The question is these days who is the greater evil: Microsoft or EMC (which owns most of VMWare).
I'd suggest EMC which is sad because there was a time they were a great company. Somewhere along the line they decided customer service was less important than software audits as a way to generate revenue. I'm waiting for the day Oracle buys EMC since their current philosphies seem to be so aligned.
ESXi is mostly closed source so it won't be what you prefer anyway.
I use ESXi extensively and KVM
I would say KVM is not as feature rich as ESXi, however it matured a lot lately, and I am very happy with it running on OpenSUSE. I've also an arch linux server with KVM but opensuse seems to perform better.
ESXi on the other hand is really an amazing hypervisor, it has tons of features and configuration options for each VM, but it really is for the enterprise. For a home lab KVM is perfect.
Hyper-v...well no thanks.. it's MS
XEN - good enough but it's lost the open source hypervisor battle to KVM.
Excuse me, You use XenServer for home , Very funny.
Hyper-v...well !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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