Hello,
ESXi was my preferred option until learning of the lack of USB passthrough and lack of support for direct access to local physical disks.
That's not completely true. It is possible to use USB passthrough, but it depends on the capabilities of your hardware if you can do that or not.
See also: http://vm-help.com/esx40i/VMDirectPath/USB_Setup.php
There's also a rumor that the next version of ESXi will have support for this, but it is unknown if the rumor is true and also unsure when the next version will arrive. See here: http://virtualization.info/en/news/2010/05/vsphere-4-1-features-leak.html
You can use Raw Disk Mappings with ESXi, but I'm unsure if local disks are supported.
Now, I'm looking at Linux versus Windows for hosting but the need to run the VMs as a "service" as you can do with Server 2.x (Windows or Linux) or FireDeamon Pro (Windows) is key.
Is there an equivalent way to install Workstation 7.1 as a "service" under a Linux host as you can with a Windows host?
You would be looking at using /etc/rc.local and starting your virtual machines using vmrun.
Under windows with Firedeamon you should also try to leverage vmrun.
From memory -untested- it would look like:
vmrun -X /path/yourvirtualmachine.vmx -nogui
Hope this helps,
--
Wil
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VI-Toolkit & scripts wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com
Contributing author at blog www.planetvm.net
Twitter: @wilva
