Best Hypervisor for a novice?

[YoMan]

So I will be putting together my first pfsense box next week and Im trying to decide what hypervisor I should use, ESXI, Xen, Proxmox, etc.  I just need this router to do openVPN with AES-NI enabled.  Will the VM  hurt the performance of AES-NI in anyway?  Max throughput would be 120Mbps.  I dont need any super datacenter/enterprise level functions as this will be for a home setup.

So basically I just want to know what is the most stable and problem free VM to use for a novice user.

Thanks.

[kejianshi]

ESXI works fine for me.

[KOM]

VMware ESXi.  Best of class, mature, free.

[johnpoz]

+1 for esxi, simple, free, works what else do you need?

[gjaltemba]

ESXI, Xen, Proxmox are all classed as type 1 bare metal hypervisors so vm performance should be better than a hosted type 2 one. Try them all if you have the time and decide for yourself.

Personally, running pfsense on esxi and hyper-v is stable. Most problems are the ones I make myself.

[riahc3]

Have you had previous experience with Type-2 hypervisors?

Ive always worked with VMWare's Workstation (ESXi) and Oracle's VirtualBox (Oracle VM Server/Xen) so I think it would have been better to choose between those two. I went with ESXi by recommendation and, even though Ive recently started with Type-2 Hyper-V, I would still use ESXi. Its easy to work with if you have used Workstation.

Oh, use ESXi 6.0 ESXi 5.5 had a huge bug for me personally that wrecked my life for a year!!!! (it was a personal case for me as I have not read it anywhere else)

[gjaltemba]

I believe Hyper-V is a type 1.

You may want to read up on the difference between monolithic(VMSphere) and microkernalized(Hyper-V) Hypervisors.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/chenley/archive/2011/02/23/hyper-v-microkernelized-or-monolithic.aspx

[Guest]

Any Type 1 will fork fine. If you want to run it on your personal PC and not on a server that is dedicated for virtualisation, use VirtalBox, VmWare or KVM.

[Marco87]

I use VmWare Workstation 11 for a pfSense VM.  So far, it is working great.  Only downside I had with ESXI was due to Hardware compatibility with a NIC card.  Otherwise, ESXI looked very impressive.

[kapara]

Depending on what you have access to I would recommend hyper-v.  I used to use VMware but due to issues like expensive support and limitations with API on free version I decided to go with Hyper-V.  As a Microsoft partner I get unlimited free critical support from Microsoft.

There is also a free version if Altaro which you install ib the host And will give you up to 2 vm backups for free.

Also if you want with hyper-v 2012 you get free replication which is really nice!!!