Alternative to VMWare Server on Windows Server 2008 R2

Question

Currently we are running a VMWare Server on a Windows Server 2008 R2. The hardware specs of the machine are very good. Nonetheless, performance in virtual machines is not at all acceptable when two or more virtual machines are running at the same time (just running, not performing any CPU or disk intensive tasks).

Hence we are looking for alternatives. VMWare's website is full of buzz words only, I cannot figure out if they provide a product fitting our requirements. But alternatives from other suppliers are also welcome. There are some constraints:

• The virtualization product must run on Windows 2008 R2 - the server will not be virtualized (hence esx is excluded)
• Many Virtual Machines already exist. They must be usable with the new system, or the conversion process must be simple
• The virtualization engine must be able to run without an interactive user session (hence VMWare Player and VirtualBox are excluded)
• It must be possible to reset a machine to a snapshot and to start a machine via command line from a different (i.e. not the host) machine (something like the vmrun command)
• Several machines must be able to run in parallel without causing an enormous drop in performance

Do you have some hints for that?

Answer 1

Have you considered Hyper-V (native hypervisor in Windows)?

However I would suggest troubleshooting the performance issues (the most common is not enough RAM for VM or host - which result in paging and poor performance)

Answer 2

Though I could not find a real alternative to VMWare Server with the constraints given, I could at least speed the performance up:

• changing the disk policies from "Optimize for safety" to "Optimize for performance" reduced the time of most build projects by a third
• installing IP version 6 protocol on the XP machines typically brought another 10%

The slowest integation testing project (installation of Dragon Naturally Seaking 12) is now done in 20 minutes instead of 2h20min.

Still, when copying larger files from the host to the virtual machine, performance is inacceptable - while copying them from a different VM on the same host works far better...

Answer 3

I would still consider esxi and 2008 on top of that if i would be in your place. We used vmware server and performance is simply not comparable to esxi especially if you are using IO intensive applications.