http://www.vmware.com/partners/academic/ Free licenses are available for academic instruction and research use onlyNow running the college production servers is another thing.
VMotion is no small feature, it permits the hot migration of a VM from one host to another, permitting a host to be seamlessly taken off-line for maintenance. It is also the foundation to the ESX features such as Distributed Resource Scheduling - think of balancing the ever shifting workload among all your ESX hosts and you've got the gist, and Distributed Power Management (experimental) - VM workload varies through the day and week, but CPU/servers are most power efficient the closer to 100% they are, so VMotion the workload to as few servers as possible, but still maintain N+1, and put the unneeded servers in standby, repeat in reverse when workload returns.
Pretty sure ESX doesn't do USB pass-through, maybe you are confusing it with VMware Server? With that said the only real need I think that USB is needed for in the server room is for ISV that depend upon it for dongles, and this can be served with ethernet devices like AnywhereUSB.
There are plenty of other differences between Hyper-V and ESX, MS still has a ways to go, but competition is good for the customer and the industry.
Previous Topic
Index
