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"But from the looks of last quarter's financial reports, VMware doesn't need much help getting people on board."

It's got nothing to do with revenue, it's about market share. Virtual machines are going to be huge in the coming years, especially in the webhosting market. Pretty soon, leasing a "dedicated server" will be simply leasing a dedicated "instance" of a server, for lack of a better word.

EMC wants to keep their lion's share of the market, especially with products like MS' Virtual Server 2005 and SWSoft's Virtuozzo entering the fray.

I did some contracting work for Big Blue a few months ago, and their deployment teams LOVE VMWare. They used it for all kinds of crazy stuff, and it worked amazingly well. I hadn't used VMWare since a very early beta back in the 90's, and was impressed at how well it has come along since then.

EMC is just protecting its market share now as best it can, before others start chipping into it.

Linux-VServer uses a soft partitioning technique based on Security Contexts. It is more akin to Solaris Containers and commercial packages like SWsoft than VMware or Xen. It allows you to create many independent Virtual Private Servers (VPS) simultaneously on a single physical server. However, there is only instance of the operating system running on the server. Each VPS has the illusion that it is running a separate OS, including separate instances of ssh, mail, Web and databases, user account database, root password etc. But there is only one actual operating system, so every VPS is running the exact same OS distribution, release level, patch set etc.

If Sun can provide a full-featured OS, the slickness of SUSE (easy package management/admin gui), good range of drivers (including nvidia/nforce) then ISPs may well run Solaris.

cPanel is by far the most popular, but my favorite is Plesk (available for both Windows and Linux). I think it provides the most pleasant experience for the end user. It's not cheap, though. If you're looking for cheaper, you might consider DirectAdmin. Cheers.

I use Plesk on two of my servers. It's quite powerful (for example you can allow clients to register and add their own domains etc.), quite affordable, runs on FreeBSD (which was important to me) and your clients will dig the Windows XP-like interface :)

It does take over your entire server, disabling all the services (bind etc.) already running on your system (but does so with a very nice installation wizard), but the system is very transparent and still allows tinkering with various configuration files.

You can download a trial version at the site, I suggest you try it.

Note: I have never used Cpanel, so I'm not saying Plesk is better than Cpanel

CPanel seems to be one of the most popular, but my personal preference at the moment is for Plesk. It'll run on most platforms, including (but not limited to) Windows, RHEL and RHFC, Solaris, FreeBSD, and there is Debian support due before the end of the year.

Its got a bit of a price tag on it, but for the features you get out of it, I definitely recommend it.

Yes: check out RackForce

They do 'DDS' servers under several plans, the cheaper the plan, the more virtual servers share the same physical hardware. At the top end, you get the whole server yourself.

The big plus with this system is that they can migrate your server to new hardware by copying a single file or directory - and they will, downtime for server upgrades is in the matter of seconds (copy, turn off old VM, turn on new VM), and you can migrate to new plans with the same ease.

The VM technology is SWSoft's Virtuozzo which comes with some features to prevent 1 VM from taking over the entire hardware - you can set it so each VM will be guaranteed a minimum amount of resources.

Don't get me wrong, Webmin is great, it's at the top of my list fer shure, but that's not the be-all and end-all of systems management!! What about actual convenient tools like MRTG, Novell's eDirectory, RedCarpet, etc. etc.?

Huh? I'm not that familiar with eDirectory or RedCarpet, but MRTG isn't an all in one configuration interface like webmin. I though the only webmin alternatives were commercial products like:

Ensim
Plesk
Cpanel

Are there free software uber-configuration products other than Webmin? I tend to stick to the command line over ssh myself.

Are you sure you are not confusing VServer hosts with Virtuozzo hosts such as GlobalServer or Spry? Virtuozzo costs several thousand dollars per server (even though VServer is slowly outnumbering it in number of features), so no wonder they are more expensive, though it does come with a nice control panel.

How about Plesk?

johncompanies "linux virtual hosting" service gives you root on a virtual server with 4Gbyte of disk, 40Gbyte transfer/month, and up to 10 IP addresses. I've had my account for almost two months now, and overall I've been quite happy with it. Although they are coy about the software used to multiplex the server, I'm pretty sure they use SWsoft's Virtuozzo.

My "virtual server" has been rebooted twice; once it didn't come back up, and they never did find out why. They were able to get it running within a few hours of my emailing them about it. (They said if I had sent my message to the right address and put URGENT in the subject the response time, they would have responded within minutes.)

Performance is good; it usually takes about 4 seconds to un-tar and compile djb's checkpassword package. The worst I've seen was when it took 20 seconds (which is how long it normally takes my home machine, an AMD K6-2 "334 MHz" with 32 Mbyte of RAM.)

Support is also good, but not particularly fast. They will work on a problem until it is resolved to your satisfaction; they really want to make you happy. But it might take some time, because they offer "unlimited tech support" to all their customers.

One potential weak point is their authentication for support requests, since they seem to just accept email from my address as being "from me", without asking for a password or anything.

With the appearance of usermode linux and vserver, Linux virtual hosting is becoming common, so if I ever become unhappy here, it shouldn't be too much trouble to move my system elsewhere.

There is one more competitive product on the market: HSPcomplete from SWsoft. They are not widely used, but claim that overhead less than Ensim's...