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Is this more or less a game on paper to get an infusion of cash for Dell, or could this actually have an effect on the VMWare business where I should be prepared for a chance of VMWare dying off?

If VMWare dies, check out https://www.proxmox.com/ . Not a drop in replacement I admit, but a very impressive open-source VM server. Something to keep in mind for emergencies.

I mostly followed this: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/P.... If you're passing a nVidia GPU, be sure to pull a copy of its BIOS and pass it to KVM.

In addition, I passed most USB ports, and my PCI-E Soundblaster card to the Windows VM.

Good luck.

If you like ESXi Hypervisor, try Proxmox VE, it's got features you only get with the VMware full versions (HA, backup, live migration), what's not to like?

Slightly off topic but I wanted to take a chance to plug Proxmox VE. It's done beautifully for me, I run 16 guests on a server for some web projects (a bunch of them run sharepoint). It's very nice and open source. It supports KVM and OpenVZ and has a healthy community for it.

Check it out :)

I second Proxmox. A super painless way to setup KVM and the web based GUI is great. Not to mention the fact that you can cluster them together for redundancy. It is aboout as close as you can get to an enterprise ready virtualization cluster for free. I have 20 production virtual servers running on it. Super rock solid http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Main_Page

I have started work on recreating my entire home network using ProxMox (a VM server running on Linux, offering both full virt for Windows and openVZ containers for other Linux distros). On my action plan, I decided to name my servers after cartoon characters that are relevant to me.

Being a huge 80s cartoon fan, the list is near inexhaustible, with short or long names. For instance, an extract of my list is:
* Tao, Esteban, Zia (from The Mysterious Cities of Gold)
* Flo (from The Swiss Family Robinson: Flone of the Mysterious Island)
* Astro (from Astroboy)
* Jayce (from Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors)
* etc (my list is much, much longer)

Then, I devised a way to create easy password to reconstruct, but hard to guess or remember. So, I take the username I want to create (typically "root"), I tack on at the end @servername.domainname (e.g: root@babar.myfamilyname.lan), then I prepend the string with a salt I have memorized and finally I hash that new string with SHA1 and extract the first 8 chars and add a couple of spaces according to a fixed schema (for instance you get "9 F4A BC3 2". I can't remember that password after 2 days, but I can easily reconstruct it on another machine, or even my phone. This is good for at least one user (root) per VM, the other users are driven by LDAP.

While we're on the topic, I also chose my IPs range to be easy to use. All static services are on 10.10.10.*. For instance, my DNS is 10.10.10.10. Since everything else is obtained from DNS, I don't have to remember too much else. 10.10.20.* is for my wired computers (DHCP), 10.10.30.* is for my IP phones, 10.10.40.* is for my wireless. 10.20.*.* is for remote (openVPN) machines.

JigJag

I've been using Proxmox for a few years in production systems. It's an OpenVZ/KVM solution wrapped in a nice web interface. Supports live migration/clustering/automatic backups and a bunch of other nice enterprise features. All free and open source of course.

You can use http://pve.proxmox.com/ for a KVM OpenVZ virtualization machine, management is web enabled and you could log to the machines by openVNC, somewhere there is a howto to enable SPICE for better multimedia integration.

If you could affored a Redhat Virtualization for Desktops it could be an interesting option as SPICE is enabled as default.

Regards.

Debian and KVM work great and no reason it shouldn't scale, KVM has some great network admin tools. http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Bare-metal_ISO_Installer

I used SelfImage recently to dd a windows 2003 box to an LVM-based virtual machine on Proxmox, a Debian-based Virtual Machine Server. Worked a treat. While I see the benefit of created a Microsoft VHD if you're an MS shop, we're a mix so being able to pump a live physical disk into a remote logical volume was great.

On first impression this might be just what I've been looking for to sell as remote sensors to go with EasyIDS. I've been trying to find something with a small physical footprint for less than $350 for quite a while. Granted it doesn't have any Gb nics but chances are someone that is sniffing that much traffic is going to be using a commercial product anyways.

Might also be able to use it for Endian Firewall or Proxmox ....maybe even for a proxy server?