Hi,

Anyone with knowledge in the above products?

I've been running VMware on a DL380 lab machine and it's now time to evaluate Xen, although given the developments I'll opt for XCP.

Looking to build out a new solution for the site to enable some hardware maintenance, appreciate if you have any knowledge to share / consult on before I head out in to the scary world.

We use it and HyperV. We were using it to run a pilot remote desktop without having to pay the arse-puckering MS license fees. Everything is feckin doubled for remote access with MS.

Unfortunately we lost our 'nix guys and they've not been replaced so HyperV is what we do now.

XEN is well worth looking at but you might find you end up stuck with VM for compatibility.HyperV isn't particularly good with 'nix apps. Single core only.

I've got a XenServer running at work, although tbh there was very little evaluation done; my key need was that I needed to maintain a particular set of MAC addresses for licensing reasons. VMWare and other options would only let me pick MACs from a fixed OUI, XenServer let me pick whatever the hell I like and trusted me not to break my own network by doing so. So Xen won hands down for that reason alone, that trumped needing 1-2% extra performance that I might have got from VMWare as the servers are only licensing and therefore under very little load...

As it's for this site, there is little $ to pay for the next tier of vmware, which xen and xcp offer under open source agreements. XenServer is incredibly easy to use, but again commands $ for the next tier of useful features. That said the $ is actually sensible and represents a lot of time saving / ease of use. If it took me a month off work to setup, test and configure, the lic cost would be worth it, at least one years worth :p

I guess I'm after any major gotchas, the VMware lab machine has been very good, just need to stop using it

I can't think of any serious issues, although my setup is about as simple as it's possible to get. Single server, local storage, no HA, no failover (I wanted to add it, but this was a stopgap until we used the University's own private "cloud" so no one would pay for it). We're just using the free edition as it does what we need to.

We use Xen Col.

I've seen your mail, but just need to get time to get back to you on that.