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Which gives better performance - Citrix Essentials or Microsoft VMware

We are planning to setup integration environment (Mirth instances) deployed on several VM machines created over two high end production servers.

I want to know which is better in terms of performance, relaibility , ease of maintenance and cost effective to create virtualization layer
Citrix Xen server essentials or Microsoft VMware ?

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Lee W, MVP

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kevinhsieh

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amichaell

I've used mostly XenServer with a bit of VMWare. No Hyper-V, though that will be changing soon. VMWare has been around the longest and is generally regarded as the best Type 1 platform for virtualized servers. All three offer free products I believe, though the free products are limited in scope. As an example, the free version of XenServer does not offer dynamic memory allocation.

I think an important factor here is securing support from your software vendor. It might be worth asking them if they support their production on virtualized platforms. I've ran in to a few that don't or will only do so on a particular platform.

brian_vt_hokie

You can't beat free. If you're buying two high-end servers, beef them up with RAM, load Windows 2008 R2 Datacenter on them - and you're entitled to an *unlimited* number of Windows VM's to run on them without having to purchase any licenses.

Combine that with Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV), and you can run hundreds of Highly Available VM's (any version of Windows, some Linux) essentially for free.