ESXi of Hyper V for server 2008

[duxbuz]

Just a quick question about whether i should look towards putting a virtual machine hypervisor on before i load my server 2008 OS

To be fair its probably not really needed as its a small school network, but i like the idea of using the hardware for maybe another OS maybe unix and also the idea of backing up snapshots

What would be best to use? i want something cheap really.

Thanks

[vikpaw]

look around the forums, lots of talk going on at the moment.
esxi by most accounts is the better with wider feature set, plus free, but some say control is a problem and you have to pay for the config tool, at least the GUI one.

windows hypervisor standalone on the other hand is free and aside from a few downsides - possible need to patch, no memory over commit, it looks like a better option.

i reckon, as you are a small setup and want cheap go for windows hyper-v standalone. it will give you the option of stability, snapshots, and the chance to experience virtualisation with little overhead.

if you are using enterprise edition, you are automagically licenced to set up four virtual servers too.

oh yeah, go for R2 editions for both hypervisor and svr OS.

that's my limited opinion.

[_Adam_]

Your cheap options are:
- VMware ESXi
- Microsoft Hyper-V
- Citrix XenServer

First of all make sure your hardware is compatible or you will not get far. Personally I would go ESXi for the sub-100MB footprint just to name one of it's strong points.

What it comes down to is what do you want to learn? Which interests you the most? As you'll want to be familiar with the product chosen if you're going to host a production server on it.

Using one of the above products to encapsulate even only 1 server gives the advantage of significantly reducing restart times which is a good thing.