OT: PC Virtualization Software

On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: One consequence of that (I use ESXi at work and love it too) is that you don't have the same access to underlying hardware with ESXi vs VMWare Workstation or Player... specifically external USB devices are accessible to the ESXi layer but *not* the guest OS. This can matter if you want to use portable hard drives or USB key drives to move data around. What we did at work for our off-site backups was to stick an eSATA card in the host and plumb it through to the guest with device pass-through. This only works for certain CPU/chipset combinations. You might also have to twiddle a virtualization-related BIOS parameter or two to make this work. Also... ESXi 3.5 _will_ work on 32-bit hosts; ESXi 4.x will not (we have a mix here). That also have implications for what emulated hardware types are supported (especially if you are loading VMs created elsewhere). Specifically, VMware hardware type 4 works on both platforms, but hardware type 7 won't work on ESXi 3.5. All that aside, I have spent a lot of time working with this platform and have a much happier experience with it compared to its immediate predecessor (VMware Server 2). It's much more stable (400+ days of uptime and counting) and with the exception of lack of USB passthrough, it's been a fabulous experience. So far, I've mostly run Linux as the guest OS on the VMs, but I know the platform supports DOS and Windows guests; we just don't have much call for that at work. -ethan