Virtualisation products compared

The 3 major players, at the moment, in the virtualisation market are VMware, Microsoft and Citrix.

The 3 companies are ranked in the above order with VMware leading the way due to its vast experience in the market. In this post I will be looking at the different products the vendors offer and their most important features.

ESX 4 Server (V-Sphere)

• Runs only on 64bit hosts.
• Memory over-commitment is a huge feature which is unique to V-Sphere. This allows the administrator to allocate VMs a larger amount of memory than the physical host actually has.
• It is available on the market in 3 versions:
  • ESX full
  • ESXI
  • ESXI free

VMware server

• It is deployed as a management layer virtualisation product (hosted).
• It can run on both Windows and Linux.
• It can host both 32bit and 64bit VMs.
• Since the release of ESXI free the use of such virtualisation product has gone downhill.

MS Hyper-V

• Runs directly on the HW just like V-Sphere.
• Can be administered centrally via “System Centre Virtual Machine Manager” (aka SVCMM).
• Can only run on 64bit hosts just like V-Sphere.
• Can run both 64bit and 32bit VMs.
• Can be obtained as standalone, which is free, or in various versions of windows 2008.

MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1

• It is free software.
• It is deployed as a management layer virtualisation product (hosted).
• Runs on Windows 2003.
• Has a web interface which integrates with “System Centre Virtual Machine Manager” (aka SVCMM).
• It has the capability of running a larger number of VMs when running on a 64bit host.
• Only runs 32bit VMs.

Citrix Xen Server

• It is free software.
• It is enterprise virtualisation software (runs straight on the HW).
• 64bit Hypervisor.
• Runs both 32bit and 64bit VMs.
• It offers a huge amount of features, comparing to VMware and MS, for a free edition.

This link has a very good table that compares all 3 vendors and what they offer: http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2009/04/22/vmware-vsphere-cheat-sheet/