hesaigo999ca's Journal: VMWare vs. Xen, who will win in the end

Wanting to be up to date with new technologies for our company, I have
come across a few virtualization solutions ( by far not the only ones, but the most popular right now). VMWare leads the pack, with Xen coming up quick right behind them. I signed up to both for info on purchasing, then went and did some research. I came across a few sites with pros and cons for both. The worst case for Xen, is its need to be on Intel VT chips only, and minimum required RAM. Someone wanting to run testing for this product will have to get themselves set up right away with their hardware, where as VMWare lets you use pretty much any box, although the more RAM and better chips, the better the response.

VMWare itself is pretty steep, being its only real flaw, as anyone wanting to start small, will have to spend the 15000$ plus for setting up small time components and the VMWare OS itself. Mind you, I am not refering to the free version (Server1.0) which is great for a small time developer/network admin to use for testing.... I am talking about the ESX version.

The important thing I noticed with VMWare being from a linux based environment, was the load balancing and other features you could usually find in a linux clustered environment ( no, not the fake clustered environment Windows talks about). That got me thinking, what if I set up a clustered environment on linux and used the Server1.0 version for linux, and see if I could maybe get a run down ESX version going...

As of yet, I have not been able to get my company to give me the time I would need to set this up, but it is a plan I am considering even for my home. Saving 15000$ sounds like a pretty good plan.

Has anyone ever thought of doing something similar and wanting to share with others their findings? Sounds to me like a possible alternative
for those too poor to get the real deal.