A few words of caution:
- Using Xen isn't particularly easy if you aren't very familiar with Linux
- XenServer is much easier to administer on the client, but uploading your ISOs to the server requires some
hoop jumping
- guest performance isn't terrific - virtualisation has a cost, particularly for disk IO (although you can install paravirtualisation drivers, you will still pay a penalty)
I have tried ESXi, XenServer, Xen and proxmox, and I would strongly recommend proxmox for a couple of reasons:
- it is based on a standard Linux distro (debian) as oppose to a cut down version
- backups are *trivial* (quite literally a tick box)
- performance has been no slower than XenServer or ESXi in my experiments as all my VMs were IO bound
- GUI is pretty simple
- support for clustering (High Availability is coming in v2)
- rock solid for the last 6 months for me
Finally - if you are thinking of moving from an SSD to a SATA disk system, again, beware the IO performance. Even with hardware RAID 1 the performance of an EG system
isn't great
I almost wonder whether you wouldn't be better off installing Windows natively and then running VMWare player on top....
I would experiment and see what works best for you - you can re-install OSs through the excellent control panel.
One other word of caution - don't believe the numbers in the 1 hour/72 hour boxes, they don't mean a thing