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hcronin
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I to have worked with Zen and have been quite impressed with its performance and stability. The truth is I only have one problem with Zen, as an independent consultant I can't afford to purchase legal copies of Zen, VMware and Hyper-V. To date I haven't been able to acquire an off-site storage copy of Zen Server to play with in my home lab. Since Microsoft support makes up the vast majority of my billable work, I've maintained an MSDN subscription for several years now. So the copies of Server 2008 and Hyper-V, I use in the lab are not only legal but supported. However, from strictly a performance point of view I've never been very pleased with MS Hyper-V.

So when I recently started rebuilding my home lab to fully utilize virtualization I was delighted to see VMware offer the ESXi hypervisor for free. Even with almost thirty years of computer experience under my belt, implementing ESXi hypervisor has been a challenge. Primarily because ESXi has been so terribly particular about the hardware platform upon which it runs. The bottom line has been that by the time I'd gotten VMware's hypervisor up and running it was ANYTHING but free. I've also encountered similar problems while implementing ESXi at customer sites. So when I compare actual personal experience with both Hyper-V and ESXi, total cost of ownership has been far less with Server 2008 and Hyper-V than with ESXi.

Ultimately, since Microsoft represents the vast majority of my billable hours. My goal is to have 1 Hyper-V host server, 1 ESXi host server and 1 Zen host server running within my lab. I then want to see how well Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager really works as the central maintenance console for all three VM hosting products. Who knows maybe one day I'll be lucky enough to only have a single VM environment to support.

Best Regards,

HCronin

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