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VMware hypervisor still king of the enterprise

May 29, 2009 — 4:55am ET | By Paul Mah

According to research by the Burton Group, VMware remains the only vendor whose hypervisor offers 100 percent of the features that it deems as necessary in order to handle "enterprise-class, production workloads." The analyst firm arrived at its conclusion after evaluating the competing hypervisors on the market such as Citrix XenServer, Virtual Iron and Microsoft's Hyper-V. They met 85 percent, 83 percent, and 78 percent of the requirements, respectively.

Features are divided into three main categories: Features required to operate production workloads, preferred features and optional features. VMware is the only vendor with 100 percent under the first category, which includes features such as elimination of single points of failure, auditing of administrative actions and the ability to migrate virtual machines from one physical host to another.

What caught my attention was the statement by analyst Chris Wolf in a Network World article. He said, "Hypervisor vendors would all have you believe they are better than the other guy, but their product data sheets never tell the whole story." How true this is? Of course, the virtualization requirements of organizations vary, so go for whatever works for your company.

In the meantime, Burton Group says that it will be evaluating other hypervisor vendors in future, including Novell, Red hat, Oracle and Parallels.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Network World