vSphere Smokes Competitors in InfoWorld Shoot-Out

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!

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12 Responses to vSphere Smokes Competitors in InfoWorld Shoot-Out

  1. Duncan says:

    never had a doubt!

  2. 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.

  3. Yry Ph. D. says:

    To me it’s just a sponsored article or sponsored analysis.

  4. 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).

  5. Larry says:

    “vSphere Smokes Competitors ”

    in cost with out a doubt.

  6. Azhy L'Cruel says:

    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.

  7. Steve says:

    “Trounce” is a bit of an exaggeration.

  8. Alzhy Wziak says:

    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.

    • Eric Gray says:

      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

      • wariola says:

        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

  9. Lindley says:

    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.

  10. thehyperadvisor says:

    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.

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