What is the best virtualization tool available?

Question

Recently my team has spent too many hours setting up machines with previous product releases or database servers with specific patches. In some cases, we have taken a developers machine down for up three days as a result. Clearly, this would be an ideal case for using a virtual machine. I am trying to champion the practice of making a virtual image of customer releases. I've used VMware effectively in the past for development and testing purposes, but I was wondering if anyone had any other virtualization tools they have had good experience using?

We are doing development in Java on Windows XP machines.

Answer 1

I've had great experiences with VirtualBox http://www.virtualbox.org/, and I love that it's free.

Answer 2

Microsoft's Hyper-V is actually pretty good (assuming of course you're using Microsoft servers.)

We're actually getting slightly better performance out of it than we did with vmware.

Answer 3

VMWare is the best out there IMHO.

Answer 4

My experience has centered around VMware's products.

I know people using Xen successfully in production.

What platforms do you need to support? That will affect the answers you receive.

Answer 5

We use VMWare ESX 3.5 and are very pleased with it.

Answer 6

For running Windows VMs on Windows, you can use the MS Virtual PC freeware.

But if you'll ever want Linux, it will fail miserably and not tell you it's because. In this case, go for VMWare. If you are concerned about the price, there are VMWare workstations and servers. The VMWare Server is pretty much the same as the workstation, but allows having remote VMs. OTOH it doesn't have multiple snapshots (one is all you get) and clipboard integration with host OS. But it's free =)

Answer 7

To second Eric's comment about VirtualBox: not only is it free but it doesn't load processes (i.e., bloat) to your host OS as VMWare does. VMWare slowed down my bootup even in a day in which I wasn't going to launch it at all.

VirtualBox also seems much faster at launching a VM and much better at translating the graphics/keystrokes to and from the VM, both on Ubuntu Desktop and on Windows XP. My guest XP is almost as fast as my host XP, it seems...

Getting the networking and file sharing and all that stuff to work is a cinch if the guest is Windows XP as in your case (for Linux, it's not as easy).

Answer 8

I've very good experiences with using Citry XenServer. It's free, has many Templates and runs on more Hardware then VMWare. The are also tools like P2V and it's all for Free (at least the Express Edition).

http://citrix.com/English/ps2/products/product.asp?contentID=683148