The basic differences between the two free products - Hyper-V Server 2008 (hereafter HVS08) vs. ESXi , are:
ESXi has specific requirements on server and storage hardware. Those requirements are far more restrictive than HVS08 - for example you won't be able to run ESXi on a white box or desktop. HVS08 will run on any hardware with driver support for Windows 2008. HVS08 requires 64-bit and Intel-VT or AMD-V CPU support. ESXi can run on older server platforms that predate those features. ESXi allows over-subscription of memory. That means you could run two VMs allocated 4 GB each on a machine with less than 8 GB. HVS08 has almost as much RAM overhead as running it under Windows Server 2008 Core - so you would need about 9 GB to run two 4GB VMs. Carl From: Reimer, Mark [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 12:21 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Hyper V vs VMWare ESXi Hi folks, I know this has been discussed earlier, but it has been a few months, and (iirc) VMWare ESXi has come out since then. Also I think/hope some of the experts here have had a chance to try Hyper-V and/or ESXi a bit more, and might have more comments. I am under financial restraints, and thus the full ESX version, or other paid products, will not be viable for me. At this point, I'm looking at virtualizing a few web servers, using MS Server 2003. These are front end machines that "hook" to a back end SQL servers. A couple of these web servers get very little traffic, and some will have more. I'll look into Enterprise and DataCenter versions because of the multiple copies on a virtual server that are allowed. I'm planning on using the local server for disk storage, no NAS/SAN involved. I do have the hardware that can run the virtual software necessary (maybe need some more RAM). My question. Preference? Also any new links that might compare the two? I might also look into Xen/Citrix free version, so if anybody has comments on that, please let me know. Thanks. Mark ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
