nux@li.nux.ro wrote:
My subjective preference is similar. By now I'm running a dozen Centos servers virtualized (xen), all I can say is "Centos5 + Xen = love" :-) The darn thing runs out of the box very well; it's stable, it's fast, tools and big community expertise available.
VMWare's offering seems to have the best support and tools, plus likely the most matured of the options. Also given their market dominance, unlikely to just up and die in the near future.
Unlikely to die yes, possibly to just stop offering shit for free, yes also. Unless you're a big enterprise looking for some serious corporate backing, I wouldn't look at vmware, but that's just how I feel.
You never know when any company is going to die, change directions, or be acquired by Oracle, but VMware has a fairly long history of providing increasingly better free offerings (better in that respect than RedHat...) so I would downplay the risk of it going away. The main issue with using ESXi is just that you need a windows box to run the client when you want to change configurations or access the guest consoles. And with the free version you have to use the converter program to copy images in or out (but the converter is very well done).