Citrix vs. VMware, Users' experience?

[Ira Abramov]

I want to make life easy for two clients of mine who want to go virtual,
but are set against MS as host (Not my work, I swear! :)

Citrix XenServer is free, in case you missed it:
http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/feature.asp?contentID=1686939

ESXi has been free for a while as well:
https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/?p=esxi

And of course, the Xen project alone is free and Free, but people tell me it's
not for the beginners.

This is what I need for the clients. Both are good at windows, only
starting out in Linux. Both need something that's not too techie and CLI to
manage. ESXi has been the automatic no-brainer choice, but with
XenServer being free I'll need to ask the Lazyweb...

I googled for comparisons, all I learned is how the I/O and CPU overhead
and driver efficiency are, but thee's no information about the user
experience, compatibility with hardware, and so on. Before I waste a day
on tests, did anyone try this themselves?

The second client also wants HA, I understand the XenServer comes with the
LiveMotion thingy but no HA features (that will cost you a license of
Xen Essentials, a remote management machine, etc). Should I tell him to
go and add a few thousand $$$ to the project or is there a reliable hack
to achieve a similar effect? (VM revival on another node if its host
becomess unstable/dead)

any ideas and experiences welcome...

-- 
Mongolian beefcake
Ira Abramov
http://ira.abramov.org/email/