XenServer vs VMware Infrastructure

Question

Hi,

Does anyone have experience of comparing Xen Server 5 and VMWare Infrastructure 3. I'm planning a virtualization project and looking at the Enterprise edition of both. They both seem to offer very comparable functionality so am unsure which is the best option.

Does anyone know any good sites or articles that compares these products?

Alternatively can anyone answer any of the following questions:

1) Is there any significant performance differences?
2) Does either package have any security risks or vulnerabilities.
3) The Xen Server SDK seems easier to understand than VMware SDK. Anyone have any experience of both and can compare? Is either SDK lacking in any respect?
4) Any comments on the client side tools? To me they both seem pretty equivalent, but is there anything lacking from either one?

Or any other general comments and observations would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Jamie

Answer 1

1) Is there any significant performance differences? XenServer is native 64 bit and uses paravirtualization, so its faster. If you think in XenApp os TS workloads, you will be able to put about 50% more users per server

2) Does either package have any security risks or vulnerabilities. XS has no know security issues, and as it´s hypervisor is smaller qith no legacy code, XS 4.0 had only 4 updates or fixes in one year, while VMware had one per week.

3) The Xen Server SDK seems easier to understand than VMware SDK. Anyone have any experience of both and can compare? Is either SDK lacking in any respect? Not used SDK, but AFAIK it´s simple to use and more open than VMWare, besides that you have an powerful CLI and PowerShell.

4) Any comments on the client side tools? To me they both seem pretty equivalent, but is there anything lacking from either one? XenServer is simpler and has no need of an Management Server

... And... its cheaper

Answer 2

Hi Jamie,

Done quite a bit on this recently.

1. XenServer is faster due to it's virtualization techniques and the fact it has a lighter weight hypervisor. In addition you can swap out the Xen hypervisor and use Hyper-V should you prefer some features of that, whist still leveraging XenCenter features.

2. Very few patches to XenCenter 5, lots to VI.

3. Looked at both SDKs. VMWare had good documentation but was very opaque from a code point of view. Depending on your client language, it may not be too well supported. We were using .NET and was a pain in the butt. Xen SDK was a massive amount easier.

4. XenCenter is a very nice client, does everything you need. Some stuff such as pool management etc is great. Also really like the storage integration. The VMWare client was fine too though so nothing much to choose between the 2.

Are you going to create a host pool? If you're going for a single server solution you could maybe use XenServer Express which is free - is is upgradeable later via license key. Also Xen is a lot cheaper than VMWare.

Answer 3

XenServer is now free which is a big selling point for us :-) XenServer v5.5 is a good product and we're in the process of replacing ESX Server - first as the host for our XenApp terminal servers. XenServer is optimised for running these.

Citrix's offering now makes VMware ESX Server seem overpriced.

Answer 4

From personal experience on the user end of both, I'd say that Xen is a good choice if you're planning to stay Linux-only.

If you want a mixed environment, I'd go with VMware as I've found their support of non-Linux platforms better.