VMWare or Xen? Depends on Your Fluency in Linux

[ Thanks to Michael Hall for this link. ]

"Xen and KVM are built into the kernel, and essentially provide the "hypervisor" functionality similar to Vmware's virtualization engine. With libvirt, the library for controlling virtual machines, applications can be created to interact with the hypervisor and running virtual machines. XenServer, owned by Citrix, is based on Xen, but adds a complete GUI and other functionality similar to what you would find in VMware, such as storage virtualization. XenServer is less expensive than VMware, but it is far from free. When we refer to Xen, we are really referring to Xen, KVM, and any other built-in Linux virtualization engine controllable by libvirt, but not XenServer.

"Indicators of maturity, for most VMware users, mostly relate to centralized management. The GUI should be able to perform any management function, and should be the primary way to manage a cluster of virtual machines. While this is truly a handy design, the unfortunate part of open source software is that this rarely happens."

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