OT: Best virtual machine server?

[Alex Broens]

On 11/11/2007 10:31 PM, Julian Field wrote:
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> I've been badly bitten by VMWare, so that's out. No discussion there. It 
> can't even keep its clock running to time :-(
> 
> I've used Parallels quite a bit, but not suited to a server environment, 
> it's a workstation tool.
> 
> I've used Microsoft Virtual Server quite a bit, well suited to servers, 
> dead easy to manage, I already have a VM in MVS that I will need to move 
> to the new physical system. We get it free (as in beer). Big 
> restriction: only supports 32-bit guests, no 64-bit guests at all :-(
> 
> Xen?
> Never used it, have been reading the RedHat docs on it, looks like it 
> needs a lot of text editing, but there also appears to be "virt-manager" 
> that does a lot of the hard work for you. I want a system that is easy 
> to get up and running, and easy to do everything with the host and the 
> guests without physical access to the host hardware, once the host is setup.
> One question: what is the difference between domain0 and the host 
> physical system?
> 
> Any others I should be seriously considering?
> 
> Basically what I'm doing is this: I am often asked to run a service for 
> someone in a research project that doesn't have (yet) the hardware they 
> need, and want to borrow a server for a month or two. So I'm spending 
> some of my toy budget on a cheap 1U Dell server to do this in an 
> organised way.
> 
> So I'm looking for your thoughts and advice, as I know some of you use 
> virtualisation in quite a big way.
> 
> How can I move a Microsoft Virtual Server guest machine to the new 
> server setup? And the same from a VMWare guest? I've two I have got to 
> move, and don't want to have to totally reinstall from scratch if I can 
> avoid it.

Virtuozzo or its GPL version: OpenVZ do the job for me..

Alex