The essentials of virtualization (part 1) – The players.

So.. for a while i have been thinking about the new breed of essential products from Citrix and VMware.. I cannot help but wonder exactly what we need, and what is exactly essential to virtualization.

For a while i have been looking into the offerings of the three major vendors Microsoft, VMware and Citrix and i have been trying to decide for myself what would i want and need for my own business.. if i had one.. And the debates on the subject with colleagues and friends have been quite interesting. To me it is a matter of delivering what a business needs to leverage virtualization thereby gaining the lower cost of operations, higher flexibility and of course  an easier infrastructure to manage.

I would like to start this series of posts with a run through of the vendors i am most focused on.

VMware ESX

VMware to me is an awesome innovator in the virtualization space. They have done extraordinary things in the field pushing the adoption of virtualization to a degree where it is not a question of if we should virtualize but more a question of how much we can virtualize, of course keeping in mind how much we can afford to virtualize. One of the things i fear in the aspect of VMware is the fact that they might not be able to keep up as the new platforms catch up on features while keeping the cost of the product down. VMware is by far the most extensive virtualization platform available today. The most proven and the most feature-rich platform if you need to drive a large and complex it infrastructure. The question in regards to VMware is really whether the large part of the customers out there actually need all the features they are getting or have to pay for.

Microsoft Hyper-V

Microsoft has done great things with their own hypervisor the Hyper-V platform, and my most recent experiences tell me that the product is definitely ready to be implemented in production environments. The product is not as enterprise-aware.. or should we say “cloud-aware”.. as VMware but for smaller, simpler installations Hyper-V could be an option for many too look at. Hyper-V is very limited in the variety of platforms supported, but for many of the customers i have spoken to, they agree that it is well worth it to have confidence that if you platform performs poorly you contact one vendor. With the upcoming release of Windows Server 2008 R2 Microsoft Hyper-V also have the long awaited live migration feature and from my tests on the Betas the feature works quite well.

Citrix XenServer

Citrix with their acquisition of XenSource put themselves on the Virtualization world map. Citrix XenServer as the product is called now is a strong Linux/Xen based hypervisor platform with a low performance overhead between hypervisor and virtual guests. The architecture of XenServer and VMware ESX are very similar in the way that they both run on a well-trimmed linux kernel, however they differ a lot in the way they connect virtual machines to the physical hardware(i will elaborate on that in a later part of this series.). Citrix XenServer put themselves on the map even more clearly with their announcement of a free hypervisor with central management, live migration and other features. VMware also has a free edition of their product but Citrix sent a strong message as they delivered close to all the features a mid-complexity customer needs to run an efficient virtual infrastructure especially central management and live migration. Citrix also delivers additional administrative features through their Essentials for Virtualization product and through this bind all their products even more strongly together.

The next post in this series will focus on the differences in architecture of the platforms and the benefits/challenges with these differences.

Rene Vester