I can't afford VMware infrastructure to do all the cool things, but I also don't have the money to buy a physical server for each and every machine I need, so I've been implementing some non-core machines with VMware Server.
I'm interested in hearing about what other people do with this, and if it's a long-term viable solution, or if I'm just postponing the inevitable migration to ESXi
Best Answer
I ran VMWare Server (1.0x, then 2) for 18 months before ESXi came out free. I did the gamut of performance tuning tricks but was never truely happy with VM performance in Server. Systems that do alot of context switching / handle many network connections are not well suited for Server when ESXi is out there for free.
As long you have a backup solution for ESXi, it is a far better solution. My VM's sit out on NFS running on LVM on top of 15K SAS Raid10. I do 'in VM file' file backups and snapshot backups at the LVM level for the images on the NFS server.
I was not able to run MS Exchange, MS SQL Server, or even a MS File & print server under VMWare Server with acceptable results. Under ESXi they hum right along. Linux VMs enjoy the same level of improvement as well.
The other comments here are great as well - no need to retype.
Jeff