Xen vs VMWare - which server is better?

[KenKnight]

Hi All,

I'm wanting to consolidate 3 servers into one. They are;

1 - The Perfect Setup Debian Sarge
2 - Trixbox phone server
3 - Windows XP pro w/Apache and proprietary web engine


My question is, which will provide the most bang for the least buck in terms of hardware cost?

And if VMWare, would you run the VMware server in XP or run a linux core with all the other VM's running hosted?

Cheers!
Ken

[martinfst]

Such a question is bound to end in a religious exchange of arguments :rolleyes:

I'll give some of my impressions, as I'm interested in the same subject. Xen is a bit more recently developed as VMWare. As such, VMWare is a bit more mature product, at least so it's promoted. Xen on the other hand gets pretty impressive reviews and it's said to use less overhead resources. For Xen, native kernel support is coming, but you'd have to use cutting edge kernels from kernel.org or something.

I've installed VMWare on Ubuntu, and ran Win2K and Ubuntu as VM's. The installation went pretty easy and howto's and experience is available all over the net. I never tried Xen (yet). Running on a 1G memory, 1,3 Mhz footprint, the VM system was not very fast though.

[martinfst]

Here a blog post from Ubuntu.NL with some links about Xen: http://dev.osso.nl/herman/blog/2007/01/18/xen-3-limitations/

[KenKnight]

Thanks for the input. I tried Xen Express today and will try a vmware server on debian this evening. Write now I think Xen is ok, but I'll know more after I play with VMware.

Thanks,
Ken

[sjau]

I have vmware server 1.0.1 running on my Xubuntu Edgy (AMD Duron 2400 1,6 Ghz with 1GB ram and an old nVidia GeForce 2 GTS/Pro).
I have assigned 256 MB ram to windows xp and it runs fine.

[barnes]

I've used VMware Server and been very impressed with its capabilities. Virtual Iron http://www.virtualiron.com, has a Xen solution as well that I'm evaluating. Its features are similar to VMware ESX but it requires VT to do Windows.

[KenKnight]

For me, thus far, the Xen solution runs circles around the VMware stuff in terms of performance, but my main problem is I'm using a computer that doesn't have VT support, so I can't run windows in it. So it looks like I'll be using VMware.

Thanks,
Ken

[KenKnight]

Hi sjau,

What did you have to do to get the vmware server running on xubuntu. I just downloaded and installed xubuntu, but vmware won't install. I'm guessing it has something with the way the kernel is built.

THanks,
Ken

[sjau]

In order to run VMWare a few dependencies are needed to be installed:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential xinetd

This will install all needed dependencies!
If there are still some problems install gcc-3.4.

sudo apt-get install gcc-3.4

[ealaqqad]

hi,

I believe for you to decide what suite you best between VMware and Xen is to know the real difference between them. I belive the comparison found at http://www.itcomparison.com/Virtualization/Xenvsvi3/xenvsvmware3esx.htm can make the decision a bit easier. I hope that help.

Best Regards,
Ibmer007:)