There are a number of Xen based virtualization products on the market, and like with other new software, there is a need to try them out in a lab environment before doing production installation on customer sites.
I'm wondering if you could possibly run Oracle VM, XenServer or Virtual Iron inside VMware ESX, ESXi or VMware Server for testing purposes.
Or essentially, is there any way to avoid purchasing a new hardware cluster for each product?
update> I've now virtualized a complete Oracle VM environment within VMware without issues. Naturally all the guests are PVM. This makes is possible for me to gain experience with the Oracle VM platform without a hardware budget. Thanks everyone.
Best Answer
You can run Xen under VMware but you will only be able to run Linux guests (and other Xen-enabled guests).
Without hardware virtualisation support Xen provides only paravirtualisation which requires modified system software in the guests. Most Linux distributions come with Xen-compatible kernels.
The virtual machine created by VMware is a computer without hardware virtualisation support. I.e. VMware does not virtualise hardware virtualisation features.
So you can run Xen and run Linux guests within it.
But you cannot run Windows guests inside Xen.
(And yes, it's fast enough. The problem is just the missing hardware virtualisation.)