[CentOS] Virtualization as cheap redundancy option?

On 6/28/2010 7:59 AM, guillaume wrote:
> Why would one use vmware Server 2.x when ESXi is available free of
> charge, stable, small footprint, ... ?

I've thought about it, but it's not really the right thing for us.

Our VM host has some special hardware in it, driven by custom software 
which runs just fine in the host OS, but which doesn't work through 
virtualization because VMware doesn't know about this class of hardware.

This server is idle much of the time, so it made sense to give it 
secondary duty as a VM host.  To switch to ESXi, we'd have to bring up a 
separate server (wasteful) and let the current one go back to being idle 
much of the time (doubly wasteful).