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Updated Enterprise hypervisor comparison

During the last few years we published several Enterprise Hypervisor comparisons and we got very positive comments and feedback on it. With the release of vSphere 5, XenServer 6 and a service pack for Hyper-V it was time for an update.

It very interesting to see how some of the products have improved over the years and how the three major manufacturers look at each other and copy features. But you can’t trust all manufacturers by just a simple green checkbox. Some claimed features need third party add-ons, aren’t suitable for production workloads or are only supported on a limited set of operating systems. You have to investigate further and I hope I’ve done most of that work for you with this new enterprise hypervisor comparison.

I have spent hours collecting information on vSphere 5, XenServer 6.0 and Hyper-V 2008 R2 SP1. Not all information is easy to find and some of it is even contradicting but I checked, double checked and the VMGuru-crew did a full review so I’m pretty sure the information is 99,9999% accurate.

I hope you find the new Enterprise Hypervisor comparison useful and feel free to contact us when you have feedback for us to improve the list.

In this version I added 15 new criteria. Many of these criteria should, in my opinion, be available in hypervisors suitable for enterprise environments.

You can find my updated Enterprise Hypervisor comparison here.

 

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 29th, 2011 at 22:03 and is filed under Citrix, Hyper-V, Microsoft, VMware, vSphere, XenDesktop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

About

Erik Scholten is the founder of VMGuru.nl and works for Imtech ICT as a Solution Architect creating the most ingenious virtual infrastructures. He has over 15 years experience as a system engineer and consultant and now he specializes in virtualization. His current job includes selling, presenting, designing and developing virtual infrastructures for some major companies in the Netherlands. In 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 VMware awarded him the vExpert award for his virtualization community efforts.

  • http://www.techopsguys.com/ nate

    Nice guide! Though I see some issues ? vSphere 4.1 has Storage I/O control and Network I/O control. ESX has supported hot add of disks going back to 3.0 at least I believe. Live storage migration (storage vmotion I assume?) is also of course present in vSphere 4.

    While not vSphere specific, F5 did demonstrate long distance vMotion with vSphere 4 shortly after it came out

    http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/nojan/archive/2010/02/02/introducing-long-distance-vmotion-with-vmware.aspx

    Would be nice to see KVM too :)

    • http://www.vmguru.nl Erik Scholten

      ou’re absolutely spot on. Thnx.
      Looks like a bad ctrl+c/ctrl+v
      because the network and storage I/O control where correct in the
      pre-PDF-root-document. I added the disk hot-add and the live storage
      migration was a double. One correct, one false. So thanks again, you
      will find/get your credits at the bottom of the new document :-)

      Regarding the long distance vMotion, that was tested with vSphere 4 indeed but not native VMware technology.

      And
      KVM …….? I don’t think I will add that any time soon. Yesterday I
      also received a question regarding OracleVM but in my every day job I
      get absolutely NO requests on those two. They’re good niche players but I
      don’t see them in large scale enterprise solutions any time soon.
      Besides that, it’s a lot of work gathering all information, checking and
      double checking it. And even than an error slips in. In this setup,
      with three of the most popular products, I can manage to publish such a
      document regularly but when I add one or two more I just can’t manage to
      keep it up to date.

  • http://www.vmguru.nl Erik Scholten

    You’re absolutely spot on. Thnx.
    Looks like a bad ctrl+c/ctrl+v because the network and storage I/O control where correct in the pre-PDF-root-document. I added the disk hot-add and the live storage migration was a double. One correct, one false. So thanks again, you will find/get your credits at the bottom of the new document :-)

    Regarding the long distance vMotion, that was tested with vSphere 4 indeed but not native VMware technology.

    And KVM …….? I don’t think I will add that any time soon. Yesterday I also received a question regarding OracleVM but in my every day job I get absolutely NO requests on those two. They’re good niche players but I don’t see them in large scale enterprise solutions any time soon. Besides that, it’s a lot of work gathering all information, checking and double checking it. And even than an error slips in. In this setup, with three of the most popular products, I can manage to publish such a document regularly but when I add one or two more I just can’t manage to keep it up to date.

  • Bok

    Just a minor detail, but ESX 4.1.0 U1 Build 348481 also manage hot add NIC ;)

    • http://www.vmguru.nl Erik Scholten

      That was already fixed with document version 3.1. You probably had an old/cached version ;-)

  • http://www.techopsguys.com Nate

    I agree KVM is not yet there for enterprise stuff but from a scalability standpoint it seems to blow the others away, making it more on par with vSphere, or better in some cases. With the recent licensing changes in vSphere and the Open Virtualization Alliance I think it will be a force in the not too distant future. But I do understand keeping tabs on all that stuff is a lot of work!!

  • Mikhail

    please check – i think you are mix notes 2 and 3.

    • http://www.vmguru.nl Erik Scholten

      Correct – fixed

  • Mjkilman

    This is an absolutely wonderful resource to have and I, as I’m sure many, many other, thank you for all of your time and efforts.  I have one suggestion going forward and that’s to include a brief description of what each comparison item is.  I know with my first pass at this documents I didn’t fully understand all of the items that were being compared.

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  • Tietzjd

    Forgot to add Apple OS support for Esxi 5.

    • http://www.vmguru.nl Erik Scholten

      I did not forget it, I chose not to mention it. Apple OS/OSX is supported but requires Apple licensed hardware to run but as of last January, Apple seized producing the only Apple server that VMware vSphere 5 is certified to run on, the Xserve 3.1.

      Besides that, there are many more operating systems out there that vSphere supports but I chose to select the ones which I encounter in enterprise environments.

  • http://twitter.com/abnerg abnerg

    This is fantastic. Thanks for taking the time to put it together.

  • The Evil Muppet

    There are a few errors in this document with regard to networking. XenServer 6.0 ships with Openvswitch and no version of ESXi supports LACP for link aggregation.

  • Art
  • gsa-toolbox

    Thanks for putting this together.
    I’m looking forward to see RHEV included in the comparison.

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