So with some verbiage I stole from Scott here's my list of primary reasons to not use ESXi. (Ignore the bullets it reads better on my screen)

Citrix XenServer Facts (Advantages really…)
• We already knows it. (It’s already in use for Day-to-Day )
• It is incredibly easy to use.
• It is very performant and this has been shown.
o VM’s used by Interactive over a 3-5 day span producing sellable work only a few days after EagleXen was built and VM’s configured.
• Zero cost for everything, totally zero licensing if Citrix support isn’t required.
o Licensing is per Socket CPU and is perpetual (if needed)
o No critical functionality is lost if support is cancelled
• Full Paravirtualization Options for Linux workloads.
• Updates are also free forever, regardless of a support contract.
o Updating is also extremely easy with Free Tools (already configured)
• No overhead cost for license management.
• No salesman providing guidance. Built to suite our needs
• VM Backups are completely free and schedulable.
o Already configured and performed weekly on hardware we had in house*
• Far greater feature set than any possible VMware option.
o HA is free
o XenMotion is free
o XenMotion Storage is also free*
o Many more free features
• No scale limitations (within reason)
• Local support available (in Rochester)*
o Unlimited free forums support
o Paid options available with licensing through Citrix
• Minimal technical debt incurred.
o Hardware cost for required needs

ESXi vSphere Essentials Facts
• Publicly and extremely common Hypervisor
o Easily supported between different MSP’s as it’s “common”
o Designed for Enterprise businesses not SMB’s
o Licensing is priced for Enterprises not SMB’s
• Licensing Cost
o Maintenance is required to receive system updates
o Essentials allows use of appropriate hardware only
o Without a Plus plan or higher VMWare offers no support*
 Essentials is a bare metal hypervisor that simply allows us to use our chosen hardware
o MSP’s / In-House IT must troubleshoot all issues
• Internal IT must learn ESXi vSphere Essentials management
o Troubleshooting procedures
o Backup systems
o Restoration steps
o Updating steps
• Requires 3rd party VM Backup Solution (Veeam / Unitrends.. etc.)

I can only assumed that they sold us the licensing for it, as they are pretty good with keeping microsoft at bay (I've never heard of any licensing issues with regards to that)

But the implementation is just ass backwards. Export the DC02 functions if you must (build a new VM really) and perform a clean install is how it should've been done.

Nope. . . Hyper-V was installed directly into the existing DC02, and VM's setup while the system was functioning.

I was asked to make a compelling case.

That to me means I should care.

But to what level. . .

The server was/is our acting 2nd on site DC, we have 4 in total.

The board is maxed out with memory. I'm not positive how the conversation went when the idea came up to do this but I have a feeling it went like " We need X,Y,Z and need to spend a little as possible"

The result was something that runs horribly. Oh our On-Site Exchange is hosted on this same host, works "fair" for what it does but seems like its over scaled. And is still sluggish in basic operations.

That Vm that is CPU intensive is constantly being asked to generate rather large database reports sequentially upwards of 12-30 at a time.

Having only 4 CPU's it can only run 4 jobs, to top it off it nearly maxes out is memory usage during these period so performance tanks even more

The trouble as far as I can tell with the Hyper-V setup is that our MSP sold it just to sell it, rather than "Oh hey spend X and build a proper Hypervisor, we'll just use your secondary DC to run these machines"

Which "OK" it works but one of these VM's runs a CPU intensive process, and in only able to use 4CPU's because of the limitations of the host hardware.

If I moved this to "my" (and I use my liberally) XenServer I could allocate 12 cores to it, and 32GB of memory (if we bought more to add into the host) and the team that uses it would never have a complaint.

Its the poor proposals after another that are getting to me. It's just not my place to start looking for another MSP... even though I've considered it.

Unfortunately I don't know what the MSP has provided or offered, I was simply told that "they / we" will be virtualizing all of our critical servers to ESXi (of which I later found out the proposed version was Essentials). When I heard this I had a real serious discussion with my boss about not incorporating yet another Hypervisor. Our MSP has already setup Hyper-V which is only running 2 VM's on our 2nd DC, and they run like shit. I don't want them creating and building a solution that will result in more of this.

So here I'm just pulling in a topic I've started on SW.

To sum it up I need some more selling points as to why we as a business should expand our currently free version of XenServer rather than trying to adopt yet another Hypervisor being proposed by our MSP.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I had to pop in SAM (scottalanmiller) made me do it.

Hi all