Re: vmware server install onto debian server
ESXi is built on a linux base OS... The biggest difference is that ESXi has memory page sharing and other technologies that VMWare server just doesn't have. In a very small environment (only one or two VM's) you probably won't notice much if any performance difference between ESXi and VMWare server on a command-line only linux distro. The difference becomes HUGE when you have a lot of VM's running on one machine.
There are lots of sites out there that walk you through the process of modifying the .iso image to add linux drivers for unsupported hardware, as well as tutorials on removing some of the limitations built into ESXi (Such as the fact that it will not install on drives that show up as IDE)
No. I would respectfully disagree - The biggest difference is where the virtualization layer resides.
ESX is not built on a linux OS. Let me repeat that:
ESX is not built on a linux OS.
ESX/ESXi runs the hypervisor layer directly on the hardware and abstracts the hardware and presents it to the guest. This is not based on Linux, if anything, it is more based on Hive and SimOS than linux. The full ESX version does contains a stripped down linux service console which provides a mechanism for the management of the hypervisor layer through the console - but the service console is not the hypervisor itself but only the way to manage the hypervisor. ESX relies on the linux service console for management. From an abstract point of view, in ESX,
the linux service console runs basically as a virtual machine on top of the hypervisor. ESXi has no service console. ESXi has only a 32MB footprint on the disk and has no linux service console as it only contains the hypervisor.
As for the perfomance difference between ESX and VMWare server - I would
mostly agree that there is little difference in a smaller environment. However, the performance of a single machine is still more costly (memory/CPU/IO) overall in a VMWare server environment compared to an ESX/ESXi environment. ESX provides near-native performance. VMWare server makes no such claim. It also depends in large part on what kind of load you are putting on the virtual guests.
As you mentioned, as you scale out, this difference is magnified and the performance difference is HUGE. This is not a result of the memory deduplication or other such things, it is the result of having a bare-metal hypervisor layer (ie: the biggest difference)
edit: oops, just read Heeters reply.. glad to know you got the other setup working. For your personal side, you could, in theory, modify the ISO, but it's usually easier to modify the install process of ESXi to add the drivers and/or modify the config files during installation to install on unsupported hardware.
Did you grab the tarball version of VMWare server?