Rudi Ahlers wrote:
With VMware you can copy your disk images over to a Windows or Mac host and run them with no changes (Mac version isn't free, though).
This is pretty much what I do. I also keep stock "reference" images for each OS I support and copy from the reference image every time I need to deploy a new VM.
I like the idea of Xen, but the documentation is a little thin especially when it comes to installing useful things like Windows VMs; I don't have the time to solve the problem properly, and I hope that in a year or two I can change this.
So, what would you use if you wanted to / needed to host a Windows 2003 VM on a Linux / UNIX server? I don't / can't sacrifice a whole server for a few ASP.NET aps.
I haven't used xen so I can't compare them, but it is easy with vmware server and doesn't require any changes on the host other than installing the vmware package and configuring it. People running xen tend to say that you shouldn't run anything else directly on the host, but this isn't a problem with vmware.