Even though choosing a hypervisor is only a small part of implementing a virtualisation strategy, much has been written about how Microsoft Hyper-V compares to VMware ESX — and there are some fundamental differences between those two products architecturally. Less coverage has been given to comparing Hyper-V with the Xen hypervisor as included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
Both use a paravirtualisation approach for some operations but differ significantly in their architecture, management tools, and support for guest operating systems.