Virtual server selection By Phil Cox

I have been muddling through the "Hype"r-V blogs and emailing that have innundated me over the past couple weeks. I have also taken another look at the free ESXi server from VMWare, and the XenServer 4.2 beta. Being in the midst of looking at all of these, one thing struck me about all of them from a security standpoint: They are all the same!

Let me explain. After having spend hours fiddling and testing each one, security of each boils down to:
- Each has a relitively small hypervisor that may contain bugs
- Each has a main controlling partition that is remotely accessible
- Each can limit who and how you can access the controlling partition

The one caveat I have to this is that the VMWare ESXi server does not have a firewall that can be used to protect the main controlling part of the offering. I do not like this fact.

So what server solution do you choose? I can't tell you that, but what I can tell you is that, from a security standpoint, a knowledgeable admin can secure any of them just as well as the other. From a maturity and functionality standpoint, VMWare and XenServer seem to have the edge right now, but you need linux expertise to understand the innards. If you are a Microsoft shop, then I'd go with Hyper-V and SCVMM.