Virtualization Technology Comparison
Masssimo Re Ferre', who has produced, among other resources, a very nice VDI broker comparison and hypervisor architecture overview, has just released a big table comparing different virtualization technologies. It's more useful than the equivalent over at Wikipedia, which isn't surprising, since Massimo actually knows what he's talking about and works with the technologies every day.
Massimo is careful to disclaim the entire thing, since you can't really reduce these technologies to a matrix of checkmarks. Corrections/suggestions to him.
And this should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway: although this is interesting in a technical curiosity sort of way, you shouldn't base any purchasing decisions on something like this. A check mark doesn't tell you how a feature was implemented or how well it works, and a list of features doesn't tell you about how a solution will fit your business needs.
Just to take one row in the matrix -- scalability. VMware Infrastructure has memory page sharing, which means that VMs can share common parts of their memory, like OS pages. This means you can get more VMs per physical box. This can significantly impact your ROI, and in many cases VMware is actually cheaper than other solutions that are "cheaper."
I've written a 31-page whitepaper, providing a technical comparison between VMware vSphere 4 and Microsoft Hyper-V R2. It's available as a free download from ctistrategy.com.
Posted by: Peter Baer Galvin | October 21, 2009 at 12:36 PM