Using VMmark, the VMware VROOM team recently posted their findings where they compared VMware ESX Server and VMware Server products. Comparing the two on similar machines, they now offer the following information:
VMware Server is a best-in-class hosted virtualization solution and provides an ideal way for new users to start using virtualization. It also works well for small deployments as well as application test and development. Potential VMware users often ask how VMware Server differs from VMware's ESX Server, our hypervisor-based virtualization solution. A complete response to that question would include long discourses on ESX Server's superior feature set, manageability, and overall reliability and robustness. Since I am hardly qualified to attempt such a thorough description, I'm going to stick with what I know - performance. At my VMworld 2006 talk, I presented a performance comparison between ESX Server and VMware Server using VMmark about which I am often asked. We ran VMmark using ESX Server on an HP DL585 with four 2.2GHz dual-core processors. We then ran VMmark on VMware Server using a similar HP DL585 with four 2.4 GHz dual-core processors. The results slide from that talk is shown below. (Thanks to my colleague Lisa Roderick in our Cambridge office for collecting the VMware Server numbers.)
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