I agree with you that it is a server product. The quality of my hardware approaches that of server capacity and benches well with server hardware. As far as Gigabyte, every Google server I know of is using custom Gigabyte m-boards. Whether or not they are using a dedicated NIC is unknown.
Now, my custom-built I7 machine has two nics both exactly the same which can work in a bridged mode. Forget t hat, I'm just trying to use one RealTek nic. Impossible. The problem even when attempting Citrix is that it doesn't support RAID. There is a lack of mainstream support here in bare-metal virtualization on all fronts.
My goal for installing ESXI is different than most perhaps. I am doing it for redundancy and to create an environment whereas I can create backup operating systems independent of the host OS. The goal here is to prevent another disaster which happened over the weekend. I have now been working for 10+ hours to get a bm-hv working from multiple vendors on standard hardware that is sold to millions of customers. No success because I am using RAID and have a standard Gigabit NIC.
I agree with you that Hyper-V is lackluster. I tried that first. How is it bare metal if I have to load Windows Server (even the core?) to use it. I am not impressed at all. I run a Windows network but wanted to install Ubuntu and get a static IP and up my bandwidth to port a popular website to my home office network without having a rack mounted server setup next to my refrigerator. Unfortunately its just not going to be possible to use a hypervisor. I'd have more luck running a host OS, installing Windows Home Server (eek...) for backups on VMWare Workstation. What a concondrum this is.
The reason for this is cost and principle alone. I simply cant and shouldnt have to afford to buy more NICs or abandon RAID just so these products will work. I am disappointed but we are in the early stages, they need to eliminate the concept of an HCL and go universal as soon as possible.
