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VMware ESXi is the easiest way to get started with virtualization—and it’s free. Consolidate your applications onto fewer servers and start saving money through reduced hardware, power, cooling and administration costs. VMware ESXi has been optimized and tested to run even your most resource intensive applications and databases with minimal performance overhead. With VMware ESXi you can:
- Run multiple operating systems on a single server and reduce hardware costs
- Run a greener datacenter and reduce your energy cost
- Enable easier back-ups and restores for your applications
- Run the most resource intensive applications in production
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Comparing VMware ESX and Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V
" VMware is the clear and obvious leader in virtualization products. We tried both the Microsoft and Oracle virtualization products and found them lacking in features and performance compared to the VMware product. "
— David Greer, Director of Information Services, HelioVolt Corporation
Other hypervisors are less mature, unproven in a wide cross-section of production datacenters, and lacking core capabilities needed to deliver the reliability, scalability, and performance that customers require.
So while others try to catch up to VMware in the areas highlighted below, upcoming VMware releases will take ESX/ESXi to the next level of enterprise-class hypervisors—further extending VMware's lead and ensuring that VMware customers obtain unparalleled levels of performance and reliability.
Read more about VMware's superior hypervisor architecture, hypervisor security, hypervisor scalability and our virtual machine file system (VMFS).
| Hypervisor Attributes | VMware ESX/ESXi 4.0 | Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V | Citrix XenServer 5.5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small Disk Footprint |  >2GB with Server Core installation ~10GB with full Windows Server installation |
1.8GB |
|
| OS independence | Relies on Windows 2008 in Parent Partition |
Relies on Linux in Dom management Partition |
|
| Hardened Drivers |  Optimized with hardware vendors |
Generic Windows drivers |
Generic Linux Drivers |
| Advanced Memory Management | Ability to reclaim unused memory, de-duplicate memory pages |
No ability to reclaim unused physical memory, or de-duplicate pages |
No ability to reclaim unused physical memory, or de-duplicate pages |
| Advanced Storage Management | Lacks an integrated cluster file system, no live storage migration |
Lacks an integrated cluster file system, no live storage migration, storage features support very few arrays |
|
| High I/O Scalability | Direct driver model |
I/O bottleneck in parent OS |
I/O bottleneck in Dom0 management OS |
| Host Resource Management | Network traffic shaping, Storage I/O priorities, per-VM resource shares |
Lacks similar capabilities |
Lacks similar capabilities |
| Performance Enhancements | AMD RVI, Intel EPT large memory pages, universal 8-way vSMP, VMI paravirtualization, VMDirectPath I/O, PV guest SCSI driver |
No large memory pages, 4-way vSMP on Windows 2008 VMs only |
No large memory pages, supports fewer Terminal Services users, no paravirt guest SCSI device, no direct I/O device support |
| Virtual Security Technology | Nothing comparable |
Nothing comparable |
|
| Flexible Resource Allocation | Hot add VM vCPUs and memory, VMFS Volume Grow, hot extend virtual disks, hot add virtual disks |
Only hot add virtual disks |
Nothing comparable |
