Best free Hypervisors overview
Best free Hypervisors overview
You already know that there are many Hypervisors around in the IT World. Today I wanna give you a small best free hypervisors overview about the hypervisor which I have used in my IT career listed with their pro and cons:
| Hypervisor | Host OS | Pros | Cons | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VMware ESXi 5.5 free | Self maintained Linux with management Stack ConsoleOS (COS) and Busybox | Physical mem limit now open since 5.5 and supports up to 4TB, no VRAM limit since version 5.1 anymore, flawless bare metal and guest installer, very solid state, wide range of guest OS supported, RAM over-commitment | no HA included, | VMWare ESXi Download |
| Citrix XenServer 6.x free | XEN | RAM over-commitment, flawless bare metal installer, very solid, guest OS support | no HA included, management Gui client for windows only, driver support | XenServer Download |
| Joyent SmartOS | IllumOS, KVM | no limitations at all, ZFS support, fast and solid KVM implementation, their zones concept | hard to administrate, difficult guest OS installation, early state third-party management web Gui (fifo), lack of driver and packages | SmartOS Download |
| Proxmox VE 3.1 | Debian Wheezy, KVM | HA and Cluster support, live migration, GlusterFS, no limitations at all, flawless bare metal installer, very solid stable state, RAM/CPU over-commitment, full browser compatible web management Gui, guest OS support | advanced skills needed for reconfigure tasks via shell | Proxmox Download |
my conclusion is that in free hypervisor sector i finally prefer using Proxmox and SmartOS because they are more flexible, not limited in hardware/software and by that giving me all those functionalities which all the other world leading commercial products have only included if you pay for them by expensive licencing. but surely in company sector if your budget is unlimited and you want to run a big rock solid cluster infrastructure you will probably not come through to choose esxi or xenserver licencing products.
VMware ESXi 5.5 free has a big limitation in that more and more features are only accessible via the vSphere Web Client, which costs money. And if you upgrade your VMs to version 10, then you can’t manage them with the fat client at all.
Hi James,
thanks for your comment. Yeah that is really a pain, thats why i wrote you should only use this if you got the money for that. the free of VMWare version getting more and more limited and so useless for small people.
Both Proxmox and SmartOs/FiFO are approaching virtualbox in functionality for a nonpower user. Their advantage of being a type 1 hypervisor makes it a no brainer. Why hasn’t some progressed these in that direction?
i compared baremetal hypervisors. So virtualbox might not be comparable.