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Old 09-19-2008, 06:58 PM
sintax sintax is offline
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There is no easy answer to your question due to many other issues that may or may not have anything to do with whatever your environment may require. My suggestion is for you to go to all vendors and download whitepapers and read case studies to see what their solution is and compare their solution to other vendors. So, first understand what each vendor offers and how it compares to others (features table - pretty much everyone has something like this). Then drill down deaper (whitepaper, case study) to understand their technology and again make your own conclusion once you have an informed opinion on each vendor technology. The last part of it would be "Management" features - this goes to the how it actually works in real life. Since virtual machines require management along with OS management, what is it, how does it work and does it fit with what you are looking to do and know. Ultimately though, you need to present solution to some higher up (CFO - most likely; disgusting person but whatever) and that person will ask one very simple question: How much? Read license statement from each vendor. So that's my short list of things you should do, though am sure I can add and you can add lots more than this simple list.

Here are my general remarks on vendors listed:

VMWare ESX - Community acceptance is high, cost is high - reliability high; there are other lower end products that VMware has but I would not think of using them in my production environment because it does not meet my environment needs.

Citrix Xen - Community acceptance is high, cost is moderate - reliability high; the new version of Xen has a great Admin Gui that previous version did not have and its a heck of an improvement. I have to read up more on what other updates it has but overall I have used it in my testing environment and I do have the confidence to put it on production systems if need be though I would need to properly read up on it to make sure it has all the things ESX offers my environment.

Oracle Virtualization - Community acceptance is moderate, cost (ITS ORACLE!!), reliability for me is unknown. Read on it but have no hands on knowledge of it.

Microsoft Virtualization - Community acceptance is low for Datacenter Admin (LOW - have never seen it used), Cost is low, Reliability (to be fair, I do not know). I have to look into it but am assuming that for testing environment it would be ok but again in my environment I would not be able to use it even in my testing lab.
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