At the same time, XenServer pushed VMware pretty hard for a free hypervisor, back in the day. They chucked in live migration between hosts, which everyone else wanted you to pay for, and you could remove snapshots without powering down the VM, which also kept it well clear of the bottom-end of the market.
The problem I had with it is that it nevery actually removed those snapshots. The disk image ended up as some ugly Logical Volume chain, and once you hit 255 snapshots the whole damn thing stopped. The VM would still run (slowly), but it wouldn't snapshot again.
And there are those who'd say "don't use snapshots for backups", but I had a very good system running based around Bacula, which did both file-level and VM-level backups. Wasn't the nicest for restoring, but it was cheap!
You make a fair point - with VMware's price gouging, XenServer was a viable alternative, even if you went down the paid route: I forget the exact pricing but certainly <10k got you most of the way to a VMware platform.
It just so often felt less intuitive than the competition.
Also...no problem with snapshot-based backups. The problem is when people take a snapshot thinking that that itself is a backup solution. Then another and so on, not realising they're now just writing to difference disks, and burning through their storage.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
