[ShadowAce]

While I am watching Xen development fairly closely, I am not a big fan of paravirtualization. I'd much rather use true virtualization such as VMware as the guest OS does not require modifications.

[ko_kyi]

Yes, but abstracting the hardware completely tends to really bog performance, especially disk I/O. Isn't ESX server a paravirtualization also?

[N3WBI3]

I am of the same mindset, but bear in mind that you do plop new code into the kernel with VMWare (in the form of drivers) on a VMWare guest OS..

[zeugma]

I'm pretty much with you on that. As of right now Xen isn't quite ready for prime-time yet. For dev and test machines, it might be appropriate, but I'd be hesitant to go with it in a production environment today. That may well change in the future, though like you, I'm a little leery of what seems to be more or less 'pseudo' virtualization.

For the present, VMware rocks in every test we've thrown at it. We'll be doing some major deployments of VMware here within months. It's going to save us a ton of money and time.