ESXi 4 or XenServer 5.5?

iaind · 1 Jul 2009 at 19:17

In order to use the features like high availability, automatic migration (aka DRS) on XenServer, you need the management server

Lanz · 1 Jul 2009 at 22:25

Witor said:
Anybody tried out the Hyper-V release in Windows 2008 R2 along with MS's System Center Virtual Machine manager? Any improvements, differences?

(Wondering since we use Hyper-V at the moment with some basic servers, and in terms of accumulated knowledge it would be best for my place of work to potentially carry on this path...)

I've been using it at work. We have about a dozen Virtual Server 2005 VM's that can be easily migrated to Hyper-V R2. Been waiting for the R2 edition because of the Cluster Shared Volume feature and VMM 2008. I got it installed on a test server, runnign test VMs and its pretty good.

We are using Hyper-V over VMware mainly because its essentially free (I work in education) and we generally use microsoft for everything.

ubern00b · 3 Jul 2009 at 10:16

http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=11045

Very interesting article which may appeal to some here.

rixarena · 5 Jul 2009 at 10:10

so can Xen 5.5 do high availability and storage migration and over allocation of ram? is that only available in the Xen Essentials stuff?

Regards Sam

iaind · 5 Jul 2009 at 12:18

High availability yes (not continuous availability though), storage migration no (AFAIK) overcommitment no.

I'm sure HA requires the management server, which i believe is what you're paying for in essentials

J1nxy · 5 Jul 2009 at 13:44

There is no management server. You install the license key create the pool and then configure HA using the XenCenter client

Storage Migration (live) is not there yet and memory overcommit is due in the next release sometime in the 2nd half of this year.

LizardKing · 5 Jul 2009 at 14:49

Quick question
I've been a pretty big advocate of Vmware solutions every since vmware appeared on the market and due to that i've had very limit experience with other vendors solutions, is there much difference in the general usage between esx and xenserver? I hate the new vsphere browser/tomcat client, it makes it feel so slow. And this thread has made me look a bit closer at the competition.

Major_Disaster · 5 Jul 2009 at 15:36

ubern00b said:
http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=11045

Very interesting article which may appeal to some here.

Thanks for that. Very interesting indeed.

J1nxy · 5 Jul 2009 at 16:46

LizardKing said:
Quick question
I've been a pretty big advocate of Vmware solutions every since vmware appeared on the market and due to that i've had very limit experience with other vendors solutions, is there much difference in the general usage between esx and xenserver? I hate the new vsphere browser/tomcat client, it makes it feel so slow. And this thread has made me look a bit closer at the competition.

It depends if some of the features which are missing from XenServer actually impact the solution you are trying to design/implement. From a basic Hypervisor standpoint they both do very similar jobs. If I don't have the need for the features and a customer doesn't care what Hypervisor I run then I don't see why I won't be designing based on XenServer. A large VDI deployment I'm working on will be going XenServer.