The Most Trusted Hypervisor in the Industry Just Got Better – VMware ESXi 5
VMware® ESXi™ 5 extends the VMware legacy of highly reliable, highly scalable virtualization by delivering even better robustness, security and performance. Already, over 94 percent of ESX and ESXi deployments are in production environments—an example of how both large and small companies trust VMware for their business-critical workloads.
ESXi 5 has an exclusive thin virtualization form factor with no dependence on a general-purpose server operating system in the virtualization layer. With a 144MB disk footprint, ESXi 5 dramatically shrinks the code base that needs to be maintained and secured, ultimately resulting in a more secure environment.
In contrast, all versions of Microsoft Hyper-V R2 rely on Windows Server 2008 running inside the parent partition. Therefore, the smallest version of Hyper-V R2 (Windows Server 2008 R2 with Server Core installation) still has a disk footprint of approximately 3.6GB representing millions more lines of code to maintain and secure. Hyper-V R2’s dependence on Windows means it faces performance and scalability limitations, especially when running many concurrent virtual machines on the same host. With Hyper-V, the security and stability of your datacenter will always be dependent on the security and stability of Windows.