InfoWorld just published the results of a comprehensive comparison of the four major virtualization platforms. This Virtualization Shoot-Out looked at the latest releases from Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware.
VMware vSphere still trounces the competition. Paul Venezia, who drove this multi-vendor effort, considered many aspects of virtualization technology and concluded:
VMware still has advanced capabilities that the others lack. VMware also offers a level of consistency and polish that the other solutions don’t yet match. The rough edges and quirks in Citrix, Microsoft, and Red Hat aren’t showstoppers, but they demonstrate that these alternatives all have hidden costs to go along with their (potentially) lower price tags.
Here is the scorecard, summarizing the various categories tested:
Look! Hyper-V beats XenServer… but not Red Hat.
Congratulations to the incredible team behind VMware vSphere – the original and still the best!
never had a doubt!
What about a column for licensing/maintenance costs? It’s horses for courses and really depends on the needs of an organisation. Sure even the competitors would agree that VMware has some advanced features that others natively lack. I’m not defending the other products, but to say VMware smokes competitors is only your opinion from the InfoWorld testing.
Cheers,
Jeremy.
To me it’s just a sponsored article or sponsored analysis.
As someone who uses Hyper-V in an enterprise environment, I am always happy to see comparisons like this – it is great to know what other virtualization technologies are out there and what they bring to the table!
As more and more offerings begin to mature it is my hope that the competition will drive each to innovate, which will (hopefully) result in the consumers winning in the long run (no matter which platform they go with).
“vSphere Smokes Competitors ”
in cost with out a doubt.
Ha ha ha!
I wonder if TCO and Capex are included — who comes up on TOP?
And the shootout I think is based on likely the current RHEV-M version (RHEV 2.2?). Let’s see if vMware can still stay ontop with RHEV 6.X
And contrary to the Storage vMotion lack in RHEV — yes it is not possible va the menus/mgmt BUT if a knowledgeable admn is running the system and if DataStores are set up “properly” — yes one can.
But unbeknownst to most RHEL 5.4+ users — they can alredy do their own Virtualization even without investing on RHEV bits …. KVM (virtualization bits) ais already included with your RHEL subscription. You just do not get the RHEV-m pieces… you use the basic Virt-Manager or virsh. But with a Phython or Java Wizard on board — anyone can write their own management tool on top of KVM.
My recipe for a RHEL HA Virtualization Ecosystem:
Stripped down RHEL 5.X or RHEL 6.X on the Physical Hosts
Add CLustering bits
Optionally Add Ricci/Luci
LVM based Data Stores
bonded NICs for your rivate and public NICs
Oodles of FC HBAs or iSCSI certified NICS
With DataStores on LVM — Live Storage Migration is possible anyway you want it
With DataSores on iSCSI — use yor iSCSI SANs features to move VMs and storage
Lotsa possibilities with KVM indeed, highly tunable, more and higher performing VMs on your Cluster…
New Kid on the Block yeah — but already getting a sizable penetration and reviews… even Big Blue is in the game.
“Trounce” is a bit of an exaggeration.
vSphere versus KVM — head to head:
http://www.spec.org/virt_sc2010/results/res2011q2/
And this is pitting KVM (Not RHEV) under RHEL 6.1 (aka Hosted Hypervisor – RHEV-H?).
Now include COST and MAINTENANCE — who wins?
With RHEV 3.x just around the corner – things will be interesting.
Alzhy,
Thanks for mentioning the benchmarks, unfortunately the SPECvirt test runs were not done on identical hardware and therefore cannot be accurately compared.
Take a look at the storage configurations.
Eric
haha.. yes it is not identical due to VMware cannot even support that high configuration of CPU and RAM that KVM able to support. So best of luck, VMware should try to work harder to support those hardware rather than asking its stuff doing biased blogging all the time.
BTW RHEL 6 will be throw VMware as part of virtualization history!
For every vcritical, there rcritical – http://rcritical.blogspot.com
With KVM support from Red Hat and MS Hyper-V, it doesn’t matter if VMWare had engineering marvel, it comes down to cost. ESX was eventually led to ESXi (or free because of Hyper-V free release) – VMWare needs to do something better in terms of management and tools for DR purposes AND to get it to the SMB space if it wants to retain its leadership role. In the SMB space, I can tell you VMWare is not even close to Hyper-V installs – just in 1-1.5 year.
I happen like that the chart shows rhev/kvm on the heals of vmware. Vmware is great but the alternative seems clear when it comes to performance in a hyperviser. I think vmware will have to change their pricing model or give up more features for free to compete in he long run. Or least support the management of xen and/or kvm in its management suite.