It has been sometime, but I still want to tell my experiences with ESXi 4.1.
\nIn the beginning, I was very annoyed from the fact that you really need an 64 bit System and at least 2 Gigs of RAM.
\nBut the rest just turned out fine, I have to admit.<\/p>\n
Theres an upgrade path available, so you can upgrade your ESXi 3.5 Machine via an Upgrade to 4.1 without losing your Machines or the need to reinstall.
\nActually - it worked, which did surprise myself in a good manner.<\/p>\n
In Terms of Speed and Stabilty I did not recognize anything bad.
\nEspecially the new features were downright awesome:
\nI just love the USB Virtualisation.
\nI really hit the top by plugin in an USB Videocard to my ESXi 4.1, and adding this Virtual Device to an Vmware Appliance: Awesome speed, had realtime video within my VM.
\n( I used it to virtualize a bunch of Servers, Firewalls, Routers, Asterisk and a Webcamserver... was really nice running ).<\/p>\n
The only thing I really couldn't test and missed was the PCI Virtualization.
\nThat feature *should* work - but you need some kind of state-of-the-Art Intel CPU \/ Board with Virtual I\/O... and I had an old Tyan AMD Dual Core Board, only... ^^'.<\/p>\n
So maybe sometime later.<\/p>\n
But after all, I'm really happy with that System, I could migrate an running Windows XP Machine to the ESXi4U1 and the Converter was really doing alright... <\/p>\n