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By Info-Tech Research Group
The most significant change in the server virtualization vendor landscape since Info-Tech Research Group's last review has been Citrix moving into the leader zone, with perennial leader VMware. In 2009 Citrix made the following moves:
- Aggressive updating of its XenServer product to make it feature competitive with VMware.
- Competitive pricing, including making XenServer 5.5 free. This is significant in that a number of enterprise management features are part of the free product.
Leadership in desktop virtualization is based on server virtualization at the back end. Citrix is the only vendor, other than VMware, that can claim to provide virtualization from the data center to the desktop.
VMware remains a leader in the vendor landscape and continues to be the dominant vendor in terms of market share. Far from being complacent, VMware has continued to develop its products with a vision of becoming the leading operating system of the internal cloud. It offers a converged utility infrastructure where application workloads are provisioned with abstracted processing, storage, and network resources.
Table 1. Vendor Landscape: x86 Server Virtualization Vendors
Microsoft has also been improving its server virtualization as it continues its strategy of being a competitive threat to VMware. Microsoft Hyper-V R2, released late in 2009, closes a number of feature gaps that existed between it and VMware. Hyper-V is now positioned to compete in all areas of data center virtualization and will grow its market share with the mainstream uptake of Windows Server 2008.
Industry consolidation has led to the removal of Virtual Iron and Sun from the landscape. In 2009, Virtual Iron was purchased by Oracle. Virtual Iron's Xen-based product, a significant competitor to Citrix XenServer particularly among smaller enterprises, was terminated by Oracle.
In early 2010, Oracle also completed its takeover of Sun Microsystems. Oracle and Sun were the other two vendors in Info-Tech's last server virtualization vendor landscape. The merger has led to consolidation of Oracle/Sun products.
Shortly after Oracle announced its purchase intention, Sun discontinued its xVM virtualization as a separate product. Sun focused instead on its Ops Center system management software for managing physical and virtual machines across x86 and Sun Sparc architecture. Sun also had desktop virtualization products in VirtualBox and Sun VDI. Oracle plans to continue Sun's desktop virtualization products while integrating virtual server management into Oracle Enterprise Manager.
Vendor Scorecard
Key Evaluation Criteria
When evaluating various virtualization offerings, focus on the solution's enablement of short-term consolidation goals as well as longer term suitability to serve as the basis for a managed virtual infrastructure. IT managers acquiring a virtualization solution should consider the following issues:
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