Virtualisation in a managed/one-app environment

Question

So, I'm very interested in running my testing machines and servers virtually and considered vmware, VirtualBox, VirtualPC and qemu. From all those solutions, I like qemu and VirtualBox most, but both of them lack of a uniformed, managed interface to handle the machines.

There was vmware Server a few years ago, which was also free and somehow the perfect solution for me. But it's now unsupported and deprecated. Is there any free follow-up or alternative? I don't want to run x players (vmware/virtualbox or whatever) in their own window.

I know there's also vmware ESX, but this requires a very strict hardware constellation such as plain intel products (chipset, network adapter) etc.

Answer 1

I still use VMWare server on one PC, and it's fine for my needs, but those revolve around running legacy OS (Windows XP, Centos 5 in my case) rather than running an up-to-date client OS. I believe that Windows 7 would be OK in VMWare server, but Windows 8 would probably not run.

If you're planning on upgrading your host OS to Windows 8, you may want to consider Hyper-V as your virtualization solution, since that is provided free of charge with the OS.