Heavy choice of means of virtualization?

Question

Virtualization

Now I need to choose a tool to virtualize several important servers. A piece of iron with two processors and a lot of RAM. The requirements are ease of management and performance. At first, the choice fell on Hyper-V 2008, but as it turned out, it has an annoying limitation on the amount of RAM per virtual machine, in the amount of 8GB for Windows Server 2008 r2 (at least 25 is required). Vmware esxi did not fit the price (and the trial version supports 1 physical processor). Need some advice on choosing.

Answer 1

If “several” is within ten and this number will not increase, then the simplest thing is to build on the Linux KVM platform. If there is a prospect of increasing the number of virtual machines over ten and beyond, then XEN would be more correct.
For KVM, there are good ready-made distributions like Proxmox, where everything is out of the box. With Xen, it's more difficult, but it's a price for power ... I do not recommend proprietary "free" solutions. There you will very quickly run into the limitations and / or inconveniences of the free version before you even start. And a more or less working set of VMWare tools is already worth the money.
If the budget allows, then of course it is more efficient to buy VMWare Server. There are a lot of really convenient, useful and tasty chips that make life very, very easy ...

Answer 2

Where does the information about 8 GB come from?
technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee405267(WS.10).aspx As
far as I know esxi itself is free. Bonuses are paid in the form of live migration, HA, cluster, etc.

Answer 3

Proxmox is a free and open source virtualization solution, developed by the Germans based on the Debian stable branch, managed via a web interface, clustered and scalable. No specific restrictions, bug-free in basic tasks. After installation for years, you can forget about the maintenance of the virtualization environment itself. There is all the necessary documentation in Russian, fast-response support. Debian is tuned, but not crippled, it is administered in the general order (you can install everything you need on the same machine, if you really need it from stable raps - no problem).

Answer 4

Xen, in the form of Citrix XenServer or XCP. As far as I understand, you communicate with Windows, so it will be convenient for you to use Windows XenCenter to manage the server and virtual machines on it.