When it comes to hypervisors, there are many choices now. That's good news for consumers, who were much more limited even one year ago. Still, when admins go shopping, they look first at hypervisors from VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix’s XenServer. Given that situation, we wanted to do a side-by-side, exact comparison under identical conditions to determine which of these is the best-performing product. “All the hypervisors offer essentially the same base functionality. In this series of tests, the objective was to put the same workloads on each one and see how they stack up. The types of workloads tested varied, to simulate a typical environment in which some virtual machines (VMs) are stressed, and some aren't. Each platform was subjected to the same test plan parameters, to give a fair accounting of their performance.”

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