I've not heard of many hosting companies using vsxi. Seems they all prefer a xen based or openvz based solution. As previously said, the esxi support hardware list is surprisingly very limited. Maybe soon, the Redhat funded bare metal hypervisor will be ready for prime time and lend itself to vps hosting.

I have been running ESXi on 6 Dell 1950 servers for over a year now. Running vSphere, they are all clustered with failover, and use a Dell MD-300 fiber-san. I am impressed at the performance and detailed integration that VMware has provided. The only problem I ever had was setting up the vCenter Server, which you HAVE to run on a Windows VM, but it adds extended capabilities so it is worth it.

I did spend a little bit of money on the licenses, but its a lifetime license, and it is worth it for all the features that vCenter and ESXi servers provide.

We have used Vmware Vsphere with ESXI for our Virtualization and i must say the Vmware VSphere is very very good

BUT the only thing i hate about it is that you can set a amount of Disk Space you want the system to have but in reality its really something else.


Imagine how many Providers would Scam there clients using this?

if you are going for comercial hosting, i would sugest Xen, good performance and FREE. we have tryed the Citrix version of Xen and it is good in its own ways, dont tink about using it for comercial hosting, i think it is best for enterprise stuff.

We have been seeing great results running ESXI on our westmere x5670's. We don't use it for our hosting platform though. We only use it for some of our internal services.