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Remember, Hypervisor I is considered Citrix Xenserver and VMware ESXi, Type II is Oracle Virtual Machine, VMware Workstation where they (II) interact with an Operating system. If you have a MAC book, then you can use thunderbolt (TB), this will give you the much added speed you are looking for, you just have to ensure from the board, to the connector is inline with best practices from MAC & Intel. If you are not using blade servers, just use the USB3 connectors on a workstation that supports their Hardware Compatibility Matrix.
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The USB stick can be 32-64-128 GB drives that can be easily refreshed if an there is a problem found with the disk. This gives the server high-speed front end processing without having to invest into disks. Then connect the server to a storage system. HP has embedded in their blade framework where you can install a pre-installed USB stick inside the Blade's architecture.
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In addition, since the size of the image used to install the server (ESXi) is less than 1GB (5.X), you can install it on a USB stick and boot from the USB stick (just make sure the disk's MTBF is very good). In addition, the services that run on the ESXi server is very small in nature (VPXA, AAM, VMAP), most of the management is done at Vcenter layer so the amount of processing is offloaded where the task/response is sent to the server to process (very little overhead). Perry, if you are looking at performance, ESXi is stripped down version of linux/unix that runs on a baremetal machine. Next you could have two ESXi hosts with a shared storage - a local NAS attached to them - if its a lab connect all three objects to the switch and put them on same subnet - install vcenter and viola you have yourself a good environment to spin workload in or experience the true capabilities albeit the starter ones of VMware. Mind you this is only the very first baby step towards virtualization and the first building block. For anything enterprise related, production workloads I'd recommend going the ESXi route. Installing ESXi on that box would mean you would have to have another machine to connect to it via a vsphere Client - you would also need to be on the same subnet so a local switch if you are a small shop could fit the bill. Let me throw some light on the use cases - if you just have one box and you want to leverage that for VM's that are for demo/training or to get a feel of things then VM Workstation is a good fit. Lots of good information on this topic explaining ESXi being a Type 1/Bare metal vs VMware Workstation Type2/sit on top of OS.
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