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We are new to the vm world, as we plan on moving 3 of our 5 servers (for now) to a VM solution. We have tested Hyper V and Esxi (free) and we like the Esxi.

However, we cannot afford the costs associated with running esxi and the tools. Can we just use esxi and all the free tools availabe to manage our infrastructure? What tools are needed in a VM environment and can we get these tools for free? It appears most of the tools are free, as we do not need to have High Available or clustering. We are only going to have 1 VM server with 3 hosts.

Any thoughts on using Esxi and free tools or going with Hyper V?

Sorry for the newbie questions, as we are just starting the entire learning process.

thanks

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  • Thank you all for the suggestions. We are a windows shop, so all servers will be windows based. If we did proceed with ESXi, has anybody had expirence with using a continuous back for ESXi? We want to back up to disk, but also we want the need to backup and restore during the day/hour? Our environment is 24/7, but not critical if there is a few hours downtime..any backup suggestions? Dec 7, 2010 at 12:23

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What OS's are your guests (you say hosts but you mean guests, hosts are the physical servers) - if you're 100% Windows then both hypervisors work pretty much as well (ESXi 4.1 has better memory management which is likely to save you buying as much memory) but if you have Linux guests I'd stick with ESXi, it's abilities with Linux are much more mature.

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ESXi includes the management tools for a single server. Everything you'll need to convert the physical systems to virtual is available for free. Paying for ESX provides management tools for MULTIPLE host servers, but since you're not concerned about high-availability and are using a single host server, ESXi will be fine.

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Yep, you can run with ESXi and the free tools. You can also go with Hyper-V. Both have plenty of experts around, including Server Fault, so you should have no trouble finding support. For a situation as small and simple as yours, neither has any great advantage over the other.

Side note, you're going to be running 1 host server (physical box) with 3 guests (virtual machines).

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