Hey Folks - We need your help. We were hoping, we could gain from your experience with implementing server virtualization. When should we be using Red Hat Virtualization, Citrix Virtualization, Xen Virtualization, Microsoft Virtualization, Oracle Virtualization and VMWare. I will be very interested in learning from your first hand experince. I will also like to know, under what situations is one virtualization prefered over the other. - Thanks for your help
I find Microsoft Virtual server an extremely easy experience just click and install. Main issue is it needs very high power hardware and does not support that many virtual servers as compared to say Linux Xen. I think this is a trade off between ease and performance.
I'm using Xen 3 with Debian and I love it. It's been totally solid, offers pretty fine-grained control over resources, and it's easy to set up and manage (if you are comfortable at the command line). About 10 minutes setup time on a fresh machine, including download, install, and reboot. We tried VMware before that but it kept sucking up all the memory in the servers until eventually they swapped themselves to death. Also, VMware only has GUI admin tools which sucks for remote management (especially when it's very remote, as in my case).
I agree with you on Debian and Xen, Debian is one of the better linux distros around, but VMware is good just that your hardware need tons of ram. Also VMware learning curve is much less steep than Xen.