[KLUG Members] Looking for advice on which virtualization technology to use for production systems

[Adam Bultman]

I'm working on migrating servers at work, and I am having a difficult 
time deciding on what virtualization technology to use moving forward.
I've boiled it down to VMWare server and Xen.  I'm not so worried about 
performance since I won't be virtualizing heavy-duty servers.  My hosts 
are fairly fast.  (Dual Opterons 2.4s w/16G RAM. I only lack large hard 
drives, but that may be mitigated with a netapp)

I'm worried about four things:
1. Recovery of a server in the event of a failure
    - VMWare seems a bit more friendly, whereas Xen can be very 
confusing when trying to boot a crashed machine
    - getting data off the filesystems is very hard.
 
2. Recovery of data in the event of a break-in
    - iSCSI complicates management and data recovery, but our Network 
Appliance provides LUN cloning, snapshots, and all that
    - Xen doesn't provide any built-in snapshots, and using Xen on LVM 
(which DOES provide snapshots) complicates matters

3. Ease of management for the "next guy down the line".
    - I am working hard not to create a mess, and to clean up existing 
messes.   I don't want to leave the next guy a server with very oddball 
Xen on LVM on iSCSI setups that'll take days to initially wrap one's 
head around

4. Ease of upgrade
    - Not sure about the future of Xen - GUIs, etc
    - VMWare server is fairly easy to use, but I'm not sure how well 
existing VMWare server rigs would upgrade to say, ESX. 


If you have opinions, I'd love to hear them.  I have been putting a few 
days' work into getting Xen and guests up and running properly, and I'm 
finding some cracks in it's veneer.  VMWare server is more proprietary, 
but appears to perhaps be a better way to go moving forward.

Adam