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Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

Xenserver in my experience at least the free edition is not as polished or stable as ESXi or even regular libvirt/KVM.

I experimented with the 7.2 Free edition and right from the installation not succeeding at first to many other things not working as expected it was not a very good experience. The management client UI is also Windows only I think and it's very sub par.

Given the new changes I wonder anyone would have any reason to run xenserver free edition. There's always ESXi, HyperV and good ole KVM (which maybe an issue if you run Windows server as a VM.)

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I love ESXi. Simply rock solid.

Yep, all my rack servers run ESXi and except for the once in a blue moon patch I don't remember having to mess with them. And with the HTML5 UI starting to mature enough it's a sweet deal. My other choice is client HyperV from W10 on my workstations - too many updates but other than that pretty good to run supported VMs - suspend/resume to kill noise and domain joined machines mean headless management!

I agree; every day we stray further from the fundamentals. Xen, and to a lesser extent Docker, and other tools, do help beautify some of the underlying technologies and processes that may have come before them, but that does not make the usability sacrifice justified in situations like these.

I'm afraid I don't have a holistic answer, in this instance, that satisfies the requirement that the developers eat and be clothed, and that the users have an unimpeded work flow. Maybe it's a moral solution needed between all users, of all payment tiers, to agree not to abuse the intent of the permissive nature of the free-tier user agreement. It will be interesting seeing how this plays out.

I don't live in the windows world, so I'm curious - why is win on KVM an issue?

Windows server is an issue not the client SKUs. Reason is it requires Microsoft signed WHQL drivers so the Red Hat/ Fedora provided ones don't work.

Possibly licensing? Not sure though, I run my gaming VM at home with hardware passthrough and basically no issues (except fairly slow disk i/o, maybe that is the issue?). I think KVM is simply stronger when it comes to resource management with its VMs also running the linux kernel, it doesn't get as much freedom to balance load across your windows VMs.

EDIT: The correct answer was posted by blinkingled before I finished typing this up hahah, read their post instead of this one :)

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