OStatic

By an anonymous user on Apr. 12, 2008

You can write a tome on virtualization and the new developments in this exciting field!

ESX is indeed installed on bare-metal and is optimized for creating virtual machines, so there is very little overhead. Since it is NOT open source, you are at the whim of VMware (not that they do a poor job or anything) for updates and security patches. For the latest versions, (VI 3.5), they also use hardware chip support a lot more. They can do very well, and almost at bare-metal performance with average loads.

RHEL 5 and Xen-based systems can work in 2 modes - full virtualization that does not require any OS modification or para virtualization, that requires a modified kernel. That pretty much requires you to use linux guest machines.

Hope this helps.

By an anonymous user on Apr. 15, 2008

By the way, VMware does not allow you to conduct a benchmark test without informing them before hand. If you do so, you are violating their EULA. Crazy!