Question : Need help choosing between Xenserver and VMware ESXi

Am about to consolidate 6 Dell 2450's Dual P3's onto one or two HP DL 360 G5's with 2 5140 Dual Core processors in each.

The servers will have 8 Gb RAM each.   The plan is to run 3 virtual servers on one HP and 3 on the other but have the ability to run all 6 on one server if ever required.

Am hoping to use a bare metal hypervisor.  I cannot get to the bottom of VMWares blurb or Citrix's and currently do not have a 64bit platform to trial their products on.

I simply need to know what components I will need from either VMware or Citrix and which will be the most cost effective for a simple solution such as this.

With ESXi now free - Can I simply run this or will I need other add ons from VMware to configure/administer the ESXi servers.

Hopefully someone can give me a clear idea of what's required and possibly how much this would cost in terms of licensing.

The server roles are (all 2003 server) Domain Controller(File/Print,AV), Exchange Server, SQL server, 2 IIS Servers and a CRM4 server.

Thanks in advance for any info/help

Answer : Need help choosing between Xenserver and VMware ESXi

This depends a bit on the workload you're having today and the number of users you're going to serve.

A single DL360G5 will give you much better performance than your 6 old P3's in a virtual environment if you have a fast enough disk system in your new server. Even though you could run it on a single server it could be wise to have two servers in case of a hw failure.

You can surely run this on the freely available ESXi or on the freely available XenServer Express. Note however that XenServer Express is limited to 4GB per host and 4 VMs per host, unlike ESXi that is limited to 256GB ram and 128 VMs.

While XenServer requires a VT / AMD-V capable server, ESXi is also possible to install on an older server if you have a disk controller and nic that is supported.

If you need more features beyond what's available in the free editions you can easily add licenses to enable more features later.

Both of these products will easily be able to fulfill your needs, but the key to your success is that you order a BBWC for you disk controller and use as many disks as possible. Many small 15k rpm SAS disks will give you the best performance, especially in a RAID 10 configuration. RAID5 is not really recommended on database volumes such as SQL and Exchange.

I did some performance testing of both XenServer and ESX on HP DL360G5 servers here and they show very similar performance.


Good luck!

Lars