Thanks for tapping into this thread and sharing your insights. I appreciate everyone's response - pls keep the info coming.
As far as Xen and Hyper-V, I think you've got a valid point on both. It's very apparant that VMware and Microsoft are much better supported for now - at least. I've played around with only the initial versions of Xen and at the time, it was very painful to get it up and running (yes, just like ESXi.) I didn't like some of the things I saw in the management console for Xen. It didn't seem as feature-rich on mgt as the VMWare. Perhaps that has changed by now?? The main thing I struggled with on Xen was the % of people using it in production and not just labs...
The key thing that keeps me playing in the ESXi world are the following points:
1) Main stream - I think I saw references saying up to 73% of Datacenters are using VMware in production now.
2) Mature and feature rich on the Enterprise side - as long as somebody's got the funding. Templates, Permissions, multiple domains, zones, etc... I think Xen can still only do 1 or 2 (correct?)
3) ESXi is the stated goal for next generation Vmware stuff and it's only 32MB... very tiny.
So, when you put together all the above and you're a person who wants to be on the forefront of the technology curve, it stands to reason there will be quite a bit of plowing new green fields and your bound to hit rocks. It's knowing where to harvest the returns that makes the plowing worth while.
For me, I'm cutting my teeth on this stuff because there is value in being at least a very good "generalist" on something like ESXi (As well as XEN or Hyper-V, I suppose). I can see the benefits in having a very small device running the same stuff that also runs on the Enterprise. That's where I see some "bridging" opportunities such as home server connecting more easily to the cloud - and incidentally, where I'm spending a lot of my energy these days too ![]()
For me however, I really love all 3 for different reasons though but mainly because of the competition it's creating. Competition is very good for all of us. Makes the good stuff have to stay good and causes the immature stuff to leadfrog to get ahead. All good for you and me in the end. Net, net, I don't think you could go wrong w/ any of the 3 options. It's where you see the opportunity aligned with your ability to capture it.