May 10
12
To Xen or to VMWare?
Good afternoon guys,
I am in a bit of a quandry of which i am asking for community assistance. ( first time for everything 
)
I am in the process of evaluating both VMWare ESXi Server and Citrix XenServer Express Edition for a virtual server project which i am currently working on. While the details of the project need to be kept quiet, the bare metal system setup information will be freely available for anyone wishing to evalute these products themselves.
Originally when i started down this path i was looking at the enterprise solutions as well as the opensource solutions for a hypervisor server setup. After speaking to many people who use the system on a regular basis for commercial use i was advised that there are perfectly capable free alternatives out there to the high end commercial solutions.
In the first example I will use VMWare, The “King” of virtualisation technologies (some would say) with a reliable, stable structure which any system would gladly sit ontop of running, with a wide range of server and desktop solutions, ranging from VMWare Player to VMWare ESX Server with vControl software.
VMWare have released a free unlimited version of ESX Server, which they have called ESXi Server. This is a cut down version of the main ESX Server, they both use the same core with the only difference being that the ESXi version has some features not included.
On the other side of the wall we have Citrix, A long time hardball player in the corporate virtualisation market. Providing solutions from thin-client desktop solutions to high end server farm “Cloud” solutions. While i originally looked up the xen project i noticed that the project was purchased by Citrix and they provided a lot of development time to the core of the project.
I then found a very interesting news article that pointed to the fact that Citrix has released a fully capable version of XenServer, This they have branded the “Express” Version. As with the VMWare ESXi solution above the XenServer Express Edition has its limitations.
While this is to be expected it in no way takes away from the core functionality of the respective systems, which is EXCELLENT!
Now then… each system has its respective windows based management tools which both do there job wonderfully, i have found that the Citrix software appears a lot more polished then the vmware product, even though they have both been on the market a considerable amount of time.
But what i am stuck on isnt an administrator level management tool, i am looking for a reliable client level web based management tool that enables the end user the ability to take snapshots of their own respective vps, to starting/restarting/stopping the system without any interaction from the server administration staff, this will offload some of the administration for opensource project this is going to be used for, each vps will allow the end developer to upload, run and test their respective systems without effecting any other users.
So, in summery, if anyone knows of a web based management tool for both the XenServer and VMWare ESXi Server for what i need please place a comment below, many thanks for any feedback in advanced.