A few days ago Edwin and me had some employees from RES software visiting us, giving us a demo of the RES Powerfuse and RES Wisdom products. While both these products introduce interresting features, RES Powerfuse is the one I would like to eleberate on since this product has potential within the virtualisation world.

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As I am in the final week before my holiday and all projects are finished, I thought it might be a good idea to check out the competition. So I downloaded the free version of Citrix’s XenServer 5.5 to see what the fuss is all about.

First I tried to install it on a spare desktop at home (P4 2,4GHz CPU, 2GB RAM) but this failed, probably because the CPU doesn’t supply Intel VT.

Yesterday at work I grabbed two desktops with a Core2Duo E6400 with Intel VT and 4GB of RAM and installed Citrix XenServer 5.5 on it.

The installation is pretty straightforward, much like ESXi, and in about 5-10 minutes you will have a XenServer up and running. The first thing I noticed is that the console is very feature rich. We all know the yellow/gray console of an ESXi server and all you can do is basic configuration tasks like set an IP address, DNS server and default gateway, give the server its name, do a few tests and that’s about it. The console of a XenServer has a lot more features. Next to all ESXi-like features you can start and stop virtual machines, configure storage, resource pools and licensing, configure back-up, restore and updates.

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April 25th we published our Enterprise Hypervisor comparison and we got very positive comments on it. A few people were kind enough to provide us feedback so we could improve the document, thanks for that.

I collected all comments and feedback and created version 1.3 of our Enterprise Hypervisor comparison which can be found here.

Again, feel free to contact us when you have feedback for us so we can improve the list.

(Gabrie, thanks for the detailed feedback. I hope  you will find that all points are taken care of.)

Update 4-6-09: Updated to version 1.3 after feedback from Jorge

Last update: November 29th, 2011.

The last few weeks many blogs and forums have spend time on hypervisor comparisons and I have read tons of articles on the subject. Many only compare hypervisors based on performance, features or cost. I think it’s a bit more complicated then that. After Citrix announced that their XenServer product is available for free I spend a fair deal of my time explaining to colleagues and clients that this is a hoax and that cost is not the only reason to base their decision on. Especially in the case of XenServer the choice and the long term effects make it a little bit more complicated.

When I read Chris Wolfe’s article on ‘Production-class Hypervisor Evaluation criteria‘ and saw his VMworld Europe 2009 presentation (DC15) I found someone who read my mind. Chris knows what he is talking about and uses the right criteria to select the right hypervisor for the job. Now you probably think ‘These VMGuru.nl guys are VMware fans so here we go again‘ but the opposite is true.

Like Chris I think every situation has its own ideal solution and you should select the hypervisor based on well-considered selection criteria and because my employer, Centric, focuses on clients with 500+ workstations/employees these criteria are Enterprise-class hypervisor selection criteria.

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Now most of our loyal followers know, I usually do not post any content on this blog other than things related to the hosting of website. It’s my “job” to keep this part of the infrastructure running (well, that’s not quite how it is, but that’s another subject for another post ). In my day-to-day job I see a lot of infrastructures pass by and recently I started to notice that some of my colleagues look at virtualisation as an application. They think in boxes.. “we need a DC, and a filer, and blahblahblah”…So I thought, let’s post an entry here and see if you all have something to say about it.

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XenServer Enterprise for free?

Anne Jan and I were asked last week ,while doing work at our companies  Headquarters, how we thought about Citrix giving away XenServer Enterprise for free and positions it as “XenServer a complete free Enterprise Virtual Infrastructure solution”. So I asked them what is considered “free” and what are the needs of the customer with a complete data center/enterprise virtual infrastructure?

The question arose because they wanted to know if they made the right choice for a very big company to choose VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Enterprise above  Citrix XenServer.

So looking at what customers answer me when I ask what their requirements are, are for me the best route to go, because customers are the only one who know their organization’s virtualization requirements.

Most given answers I get when I ask for the requirements are:

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