When to use vmware compared to xen, etc

Therhino

I had a quick question what would be the reason to choose either one rather than the other?

Thanks

Ryan

RTmarc

When a tight budget is in place, you'll save money on using something other than VMware. VMware is excellent - and arguably the best - at what they do but you are going to pay for that excellence.

HeroPsycho

RTmarc wrote: »

When a tight budget is in place, you'll save money on using something other than VMware. VMware is excellent - and arguably the best - at what they do but you are going to pay for that excellence.

I don't agree. It depends what saves you more money - conserving licensing costs, conserving operational costs, better hardware consolidation, etc.

For example, there's no doubt VMware has the highest licensing costs, but if you can get double the VM's per physical host or more (which is common), the licensing costs might pale in comparison to the savings in operational costs, etc.

I would argue Xen may be superior depending upon your needs in virtual desktop infrastructure scenarios because of the ICA client being superior to RDP. It also costs less in software licensing alone than VMware typically speaking, but I don't think saving money on software licensing is what should be driving the decision, and even that comes with some caveats. You can still do ESXi for free as an example, but you lack central management and other features you could get with Xen for a lower price. Still, if you're not looking for central management and other advanced features, I'd usually take ESXi free over Xen any day of the week if you don't need anything that Xen provides for no cost over ESXi.

The best way IMO to approach which one you should choose is just like any other decision about software. Figure out what features you need, which ones are wants, what your budget is, and price out the entire solution between the two. Some additional intangibles VMware has is a far larger ecosystem of third party vendors for everything from monitoring to disaster recovery, larger vendor support for apps and OS's running on VMware, larger support network of IT pros who know how to manage it, and has at this point a far brighter future to survive in the long run than Xen. If you don't think that's important, ask how Virtual Iron customers are feeling right now.