Which virtualization platform would you recommend for the greatest balance of performance, reliability, and community support.

Let me know if I need to add some options.

hi mrtwice

this is my first post too.

I need experience in Virtualization. i have a VPZ service and they use Virtuozzo. Works great..

If someone can tell me how to edit the poll, I would like to turn the feature off where it shows each user's vote. That's not really necessary, I just saw "public" and wanted everyone to be able to see it.

KVM of course. It's _the_ Linux hypervisor.

i love vmware ESXI server i use it with my 2 linux and 1 windows (Only for exchange) servers

I have settled on Virtualbox from Sun. It has always worked no matter what the guest OS was. Very fast and it got the best score from the recent shoot out in Linux Journal. I also like the little lights at the bottom of the window. Nice to know if activity is going on.

Sorry, I can't vote because I do not have experience of all the virtualisation products listed so cannot say which is best (and, chances are, even if I did know them all well, "best" would depend on what they were going to be used for).

I miss zVM in the list :}

Linux Journal (Nov.2009) did a head to head comparison between VMWare, VirtualBox and KVM with VirtualBox coming out best over all.

I used to use VMware workstation a long time ago. I let my license expire, but when I tried vmware server 1.0.x I decided that was good enough for my needs. But then they brought out 2.0, which IMO has the world's worst interface ever. No, wait, it's even worse than that!

This drove me to try out vbox; it took a small bit of effort to switch over, but, as they say, I haven't looked back. (OK, that's a lie, I have a couple of VMs that I need to convert to vbox format, but...)

vmware was good while it lasted...

Cheers.
Jim

It's sad that this poll doesn't list QEMU

...or Virtual PC (not that anyone will vote for that)

I <3 VMware but I wish ESXi had a fully supported SSH feature. Yes, I know you can go thru the back door and use SSH, but if it's not supported by VMware, enterprise departments frown upon me using it.

KVM makes the very best argument, IMO, using the process-management resources of the Linux kernel to manage virtual environments.

But I invested a fair amount of effort trying to install FreeBSD under KVM with no success. After I got tired of trying, I noticed the KVM website said there were problems with running FreeBSD as a guest. (Although now I see it says FreeBSD works!)

In the meantime, I'm having great success with VirtualBox.

I just wish VirtualBox would run when the KVM Linux module is loaded so I could experiment with both.

I know a few people have requested I add options to the poll. Sorry, it doesn't look like I can edit the poll.

Also, at least two commenters have mentioned the comparison on Linux Journal, here is the link:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10528