[NTLUG:Discuss] Big Changes in Commercial Server Virtualization Landscape

[Chris Cox]

Fred Hensley wrote:
> Howdy gang,
> 
> First, major kudos to Ralph for his Virtualbox presentation last week.  
> I was impressed by what that system can do.
> 
> In this hot server virtualization market, for those who haven't already 
> noticed, it appears that the folks at Xen (Citrix) have just upped 
> their  proverbial anty by freely releasing the full version Xen 
> enterprise competitor to Vmware ESX. A fairly good summary article link 
> follows:
> 
> http://www.virtualization.info/2009/02/citrix-xenserver-is-now-free-xencenter.html
> 

Xen has been free for a long time though.  So much so, that both SUSE Enterprise
and Red Hat use it as their built-in virtualization choice (note: Red Hat will
move to kvm in their RHEL 6 release).

VMware survives because it was there... and is still there.  It runs on
old hardware and new hardware and it has the pieces to make managing the
VMs easy.  It's what people are used to.  Hard to displace once it's in
use and the VM train left the station several years ago.

For people new to virtualization (e.g. a new company or one with their
head buried in the sand), there are many choices.

Personally, like Red Hat, I believe Xen will be the one that loses.
So, I think we'll be left with VMware and something else... likely
kvm... but it needs more polish (tool wise).  If kvm (the official
hypervisor built into the Linux kernel) gets going, I think it
will ultimately win... but it will take a LONG time to displace
VMware in the already established world of VMs out there.