dear gurus,

we are planning to purchasse virtualiztion product for our servers, our server are mixed enviornemtn of windows 2003/2008, rhel 5/4,centos etc. there is san stroage also.

can some one assist how we can find who is best product, or any rating like top5 top10 virtulization for servers,san,stroage or data center.

basically there are open source, and free products. and paid product. but difficult to analys between two.

the target purpose to test various enviornment various things. to avoid saving machine.

suggest advise in your experience life.

best regards

Well a significant change that's happening at the moment is that virtualization is beginning to stop being a product in it's own right. RedHat recently launched RHEV which is a clustered enterprise level system for deploying virtual machine environments, but not as a profit making product but more as just the way you do it. So companies like VMware are coming under fire for that being all they do.

That said, VMware is good and does the job well at the moment. It's still the case as with Cisco, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, no one got sacked for buying it.

You're not really too clear on what scale of virtualization you want etc, but be aware that different products go to dofferent depths. e.g VMware ESX is sold as an appliance in the main, so needs to state that it supports iSCSI etc. Xen or KVM however sit on top of a Linux operating system, meaning access to storage is none of it's concern, so a feature list can be VERY misleading.

dear sir

as i mention, i need for testing purpose, let say we have our prodcution enviornemnt, i want to test something. so i can build virtual machine test and confirm, if patch apply work, if upgrade work or failed etc.

os has no restrication and virtual software also no restriction. in redhat i found they are sale $499/- per licenese

vmware server free to download support is paid, esxi is i could not understand clearly, as their r hp,ibm,dell iso provide and they demand we must have 64bit to install, esxi work as os type.vmnware sphere use for data center.

conclude on large scale, cluster level, data center level what we should try/learn open source,trial,paid virtual software?

the virtual world software rapidly changing enviornment everywhere

regards

if it's only for test, who cares? A couple of rhel boxes with Xen will be fine.

if you want a good supported solution, check out RHEV (Red Hat enterprise Virtualization) on http://www.redhat.com/virtualization/rhev/

You could also use vmware esxi, which is also free.
Plus you get an evaluation for the vCenter for 60 days should work well for your testing.

I dropped vmware in favor of kvm.
I work in a production environment and i am a big fan of vmware, but the last improvements of Qemu/kvm amazed me.
Especially about speed and stability. Also, working with relative images is sooo cool and easy. Only one read-only base image, and many many relatives to play with.