XenServer vs VMware Infrastructure

Question

Does anyone have experience of comparing Xen Server 5 and VMWare Infrastructure 3. I\'m planning a virtualization project and looking at the Enterprise edition of both. They bot

Answer 1

Done quite a bit on this recently.

1. XenServer is faster due to it's virtualization techniques and the fact it has a lighter weight hypervisor. In addition you can swap out the Xen hypervisor and use Hyper-V should you prefer some features of that, whist still leveraging XenCenter features.

2. Very few patches to XenCenter 5, lots to VI.

3. Looked at both SDKs. VMWare had good documentation but was very opaque from a code point of view. Depending on your client language, it may not be too well supported. We were using .NET and was a pain in the butt. Xen SDK was a massive amount easier.

4. XenCenter is a very nice client, does everything you need. Some stuff such as pool management etc is great. Also really like the storage integration. The VMWare client was fine too though so nothing much to choose between the 2.

Are you going to create a host pool? If you're going for a single server solution you could maybe use XenServer Express which is free - is is upgradeable later via license key. Also Xen is a lot cheaper than VMWare.