Hmm ... You make an good point. So it sounds to me that ease of use and performance can both be achieved with VMWare on *nix. Over the past 20+ years I've had far too many driver nightmares on multiple operating systems so this is something that can easy drive me away. I'm just going for the path of least resistance. When you tested the two against each other what were your metrics ... just curious. Since I'm, more or less, looking to build a server farm (4 MS) I'm not concerned about video but hard drive performance would be of interest. The other *nix VM's mentioned: Solaris & Fedora, are just for reference so performance on these is a non-issue. This drifts a bit off topic but what are your thoughts on running VM's on their own hard drives, i.e., having all of the VM files stored on a RAID5 volume or each on its' own HDD? I'm looking at RAID5 for the primary storage volume (nVidia motherboard based). If you are not the intended recipient of this message (including attachments), or if you have received this message in error, immediately notify us and delete it and any attachments. If you no longer wish to receive e-mail from Edward Jones, please send this request to messages at edwardjones.com. You must include the e-mail address that you wish not to receive e-mail communications. For important additional information related to this e-mail, visit www.edwardjones.com/US_email_disclosure -----Original Message----- From: centos-virt-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-virt-bounces at centos.org] On Behalf Of Fabian Arrotin Sent: Friday, November 09, 2007 3:23 PM To: Discussion about the virtualization on CentOS Subject: RE: [CentOS-virt] New to the list ... Looking foranyrecommendations inre: VMWare Vs. Xen Then forget about Xen (just my opinion) , i mean Xen without proprietary drivers for the emulated nics, scsi controllers etc ... I've seen during my tests that it's faster to run a Windows (with the freely available/included vmware guest drivers) box inside of Vmware server than the same Windows (without any optimized drivers, because not availble) in Xen ... I know that such 'accelerated' drivers for Xen are available from Xensource and were announced also by Novell (for a annual price of 300 $ / guest iirc ! , to be verified though). Red Hat announced the same thing (no prices yet) for the xen optimized drivers for unmodified OSes for 5.1 ...