Xen, KVM, Hyper-V, Oh My…And vSphere…Just Does Not Have The Same Ring As…Lions, Tigers and Bears?
Virtualization Critical Comparison – Chapter 04
I have been spending a lot of time with XenServer 5, Hyper-V 2008, and of course VMware vSphere, over the last month or so. I expect I will continue to do this through March 2009. I planned to spend some serious time with KVM, but have not as yet had the time or resources to do so, yet. Fortunately or unfortunately, I have not been surprised by what I have seen and learned. My expectations have been met, things are improving in general, but maybe not as fast as I would prefer. No, don’t misunderstand me, I realize things take time. What I am saying is that I expected more from everyone, in comparison to everyone else, when new features would be added, not if. That everyone would steal more ideas from each other, and get these features started sooner than they have, in their respective platforms years ago, rather than in the coming year or so. For example, VMware now seriously is working towards imaging, or Microsoft now seriously working towards transparent migration. In both examples, VMware and Microsoft could have achieved these features years ago.
Here is my explanation of the key strategic issue per platform now, as a concept, not a specific feature comparison or analysis:
- At least the way I see Xen, given what I have researched and experienced so far. Xen seems to be dying. RedHat does not seem to know how to spell the world Xen, interesting since after all they were significant to the development and enhancement of Xen. I not sure why this is the case, Xen is a good platform, even if it does lack the features that make it a true enterprise solution, say compared to VMware. RedHat can not control the destiny of Xen, given Citrix being in the picture, so RedHat moving to KVM seems logical. However, Citrix I fear in light of Hyper-V, can not continue with Xen either.
- Microsoft, which should be called the Godzilla of virtualization, is just about ready to pop-up and trash everyone and everything that is not Microsoft. Of course, Hyper-V, yes, wonderful Hyper-V, well, it is a threat to everyone, but System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) is a pain to install, a pain to use, and worse, it appears to me, to be very slow, slower than vCenter, which is significant. SCVMM is a pain to interpret, above all else, every single time SCVMM reports an issue it fails to explain it well, whatever the issue is. I love the…Host Needs Attention generic warning…most often this appears when an individual host needs a few hot-fixes applied, but now where in the SCVMM interface are the individual hot-fixes itemized? And of course SCVMM does not integrate into Microsoft Update, so you have no clue what the real specific hot-fixes issues are, if in fact the issue is missing hot-fixes. How many firms are going to purchase SCVMM or Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) for Hyper-V? Not many. SCVMM and/or MOM are not inexpensive.
- KVM, as I said above, I have not spent enough time with KVM yet to have a detailed list of the good, the bad, and the ugly for KVM. However, as the late comer to this world of virtualization as we know it today, it has a very complex set of features and options that it must achieve to compete with VMware, and to some degree Hyper-V and Xen. The KVM open source heritage with support from IBM is a good thing, but can it really survive? Only time will tell.
- VMware of course is King Kong. Mature, stable, feature set deep and wide, most of the time there is obvious intelligence behind the design. But dang it, it costs too much. Given the current economic down turn, this is more significant than ever. I have read three (3) different proposals, in the last 10 days, from different enterprise architects from various places, that want to walk away from VMware, today, just because Hyper-V exists, and the single justification is, total cost, Never mind, that Hyper-V on clustering is horrible to setup and difficult to manage. That Hyper-V has some impossible single-point-of-failure-issues. Nevermind that supporting Hyper-V will be expensive given real and instance out-of-the-box limitations. VMware is in the clouds, discussing vSphere and its wonders. But are they watching the back door? ESXi free or not, is useless to anyone that has any significant scale of virtualization to implement and support. Any serious enterprise must have vCenter at a minimum. This makes Hyper-V look easy to implement at a strategic level, because it is just part of Windows 2008. Wrong. Hyper-V is an operational nightmare at a tactical level. Worse, if a firm is not going to purchase SCVMM or MOM, they of course will not be purchasing much if anything in or from vSphere. So where does that leave VMware?
At this point, I am sure most of you, are saying…What does any of this have to do with the title of this blog entry? I will elucidate. Well, the bears are gone; the bulls own the market right now, this economic situation, is innovation-to-support-expansion (ISE) death. True, I may have misled everyone, by referencing Bears, but…Lions, Tigers, and Bulls…Has no ring to it either. As for the Lions, they are the enterprise customers; they put up a good image, talk big, but behind the scenes, are doing little or nothing, everything is status quo, which is not good for any hypervisor vendor. Lions often have multi-year, enterprise licensing, so they will just continue as they have, using the product mix already licensed to continue in a tactical mindset. Thus the ISE projects are dropping off the RADAR like bugs flying too close to a zapper! The Tigers are the interesting aspect, they are the loners, singular, mavericks that will purchase what, when, and how they want, but over all, do not represent sufficient market share or scope to support the robust and extensive virtualization vendor industry.
I expect that the virtualization technology and related companies, especially the remaining 3rd party solution providers, for the most part will go the way of the Dot-Com firms collapse about 2000, we will see flood of failures, mergers, buy outs, etc., beyond the purchases that VMware has already made the last two (2) years. My view is that this chaos will last for about 9 or so months, with the avalanche hitting about June 2009, and thus going into 2010. This means that as Hyper-V starts to major in 2011, VMware will be in difficult situation. I would not be surprised, to see the greater hypervisor oriented virtualization market consolidate as well, to just two (2) firms, VMware and Microsoft. Leaving us, with King Kong, and Godzilla? Was there not a cult classic movie by that title in the 1960s? Yes, Kingu Kongu Tai Gojira. But I was always a Wizard of Oz fan, so I am sticking with Lions, Tigers, and Bulls, cough, Bears.
9 comments January 28th, 2009
