Back by popular demand, the Enterprise Hypervisor feature comparison.
After the release of our latest comparison I’ve received a lot of requests to include RedHat’s RHEV to the comparison. Although I’ve never encountered it in enterprise environments, I decided to add it as a service to our readers.
I based the RedHat features on their 3.1 version which is in beta right now. This is because I’ve limited knowledge of the product and I received an updated comparison from one of our readers based on this version.
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.
Two weeks ago VMware released the new version of their vSphere hypervisor, so it’s time to update our Enterprise Hypervisor comparison. It very impressive to see how quick VMware has reacted to the Hyper-V 3 announcements and has taken most of the wind out of the Microsoft sails.
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.
The information on Microsoft Server 2012 Hyper-V features is very inconsistent, many different values out there.
In this version I added 10 new criteria. Many of these criteria should, in my opinion, be available in hypervisors suitable for enterprise environments.
Starwind is an innovative company and one of the first to offer an iSCSI initiator on the Microsoft Windows platform without a lot of hassle. The company offers Not For Resale (NFR) licenses to some specific groups of IT professionals.
If you hold or are one of the following:
VMware vExpert
VMware Certified Instructor (VCI)
Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP)
Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT)
Citrix Technology Professional (CTP)
Citrix Certified Instructor (CCI).
you can get a free NFR license for its best-of-breed High Availability SAN solutions software to fuel your Lab. What do you need to do?
Since my article on ‘Storage Optimization with Atlantis‘ on April 3rd, I’ve been in contact with Atlantis and got some additional information I would like to share with you.
First of all, in the article it says the following:
Another point of interest is, does Atlantis live up to the promises made regarding the alleged savings of up to 90%? Of course these numbers are sales numbers and it’s up to 90%. But recently I heard about some Atlantis test results from renowned industry parties, which aren’t so positive as the sales number want you to believe. The first tests do show a huge decrease of read I/O but they also show an increase in write I/O. Now, I don’t want to claim that the myth is busted, further investigation and testing is required, but you should definitely try before you buy.
The issues mentioned above where discovered by our colleagues from PQR and also by the Cisco VXI team. But according to Atlantis, they have already corrected this issue.
The issue with the linked clones was caused by mis-alignment of the redo logfile because of the VMware View Composer and linked clone format. Atlantis released anew version which is able to treat a linked clone specifically for this issue and correct misaligned writes.
According to Atlantis, the PQR team has already retested Atlantis ILIO and found good write offload as promised.
The second item I would like to share, is a concern Anne Jan raised when using Atlantis ILIO.
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.
The competition in the VDI space is fierce and VMware is slowly closing the gap with the features their products are offering compared to the competition.
Although the gap is closing VMware is still very much in the lead when it comes to setting up and administrating the virtual environment.
On the YouTube channel vmwareview there are four video’s released showing some administrating tasks for both VMware view 4.6 and Citrix XenDesktop 5.
Of course we all knew that already Paul Venezia posted an in depth article on Infoworld where he compares the four main server virtualization software competitors on a selection of criteria.
Now, you can nit-pick on the measurements he made or the criteria he has chosen, but in general I think it’s a solid test of up-to-date versions.
The best conclusions I can draw from his report are these:
VMware might not always be the cheapest, VMware might not always be the one with the highest speeds.. but VMware is still the one with the most diverse OS support (any x86 OS can be virtualized), the best management toolkit and the most reliable architecture.
One of my coworkers pointed me to a video from this years Tech-Ed Europe about VDI protocols. Bernhard Tritsch did an interesting comparison between the different remote protocols used in today’s VDI solutions. In a 60 minute session Bernhard explains the differences between location (host vs client), type (hardware vs software) rendering and compression types (lossless vs lossy).
Although the results aren’t that good for PCoIP (software version) it still is a very interesting video.
Last week we had a meeting with a McAfee Sales Engineer and he told us something I have been waiting for for a long time.
McAfee now has a product especially for virtualized environments, McAfee MOVE (Management for Optimized Virtual Environments). After Trend Micro, McAfee is now the second anti-virus company, that I know of, which has a product especially for virtual environments.
McAfee’s Management for Optimized Virtual Environments (MOVE) platform is combines speed ad security by significantly reducing the overhead of protecting individual machines in a VMware or Citrix virtual environment. Support for Microsoft Hyper-V is not available yet.
McAfee MOVE does this by offloading all anti-virus tasks to an appliance/server which needs to be installed on each ESX host or XenServer in a cluster. The only McAfee components which needs to be installed on the virtual server or desktop is the McAfee MOVE client and the ePO agent.
Last year we published an Enterprise Hypervisor comparison and we got very positive comments and feedback on it.
During the last few weeks I received many update requests so I decided to update the old hypervisor comparison but this time I changed the setup a bit.
Changes:
No beta or pre-release versions are used. In the last document we also compared Hyper-V R2 beta which wasn’t officially released.
This time all software is available and no features are subject to change due to beta-test, etc.;
The versions used are the platinum/ultimate/fully-featured versions of the hypervisors. Product features can be limited by lower license versions;
No free versions have been used in this comparison.
It is always nice to see how Citrix fan-boys reacts on publications about VMware View. Especially when it comes to an comparison or XenApp for View trade in. It is often said that Citrix listens to their customers but they are seldom heard! People need simple solutions in a complex IT world. Why pay for a very high end piece of engineering like a Ferrari if I can get the job done with a Volkswagen! OK, it is nice to have a car that nobody else has and can do 320 km/h but in times were budgets are under pressure, I have a hard time defending expensive, complex and high-end solutions.
The fact that VDI is putting a significant load on the storage is true, but that counts for every VDI solutions including XenDesktop, so no differences there. Also the new upcoming version of View includes a basic profile management solution “Persona Management”. Which makes the use of linked clones a very workable solution.
When you compare installing View and XenDesktop you will see the following diagram.
When it comes down to management consoles the two solutions also look very different.
As a reaction on the Citrix program to trade in your VMware View licenses for XenDesktop, VMware comes with a program to trade in your XenApp licenses for VMware View.
The trade in program is quite simple: For the price of 3 years XenApp SA (€ 182,-) you will get View Premier and 3 years SnS.
VMware’s offer differs from the one from Citrix in a few way’s.
After attending the dutch Citrix Partner Exchange 2010 I realized that there is a lot of FUD out there:
in the Citrix community with regards to VMware View and PCoIP;
with me personally with regards to XenDesktop (no F, but a lot of UD)
This is also what we saw when Alex shared his experience with Citrix XenDesktop, which was not so positive, and we got a lot of comments comparing XenDesktop to VMware View.
But the Citrix Partner Exchange got me interested in XenDesktop and XenClient and I decided to do a little research. Then I came across Brian Maddens site to find that he had just finished his ‘Geek week VDI‘ in which he did a ‘real life’ lab-test with VMware, Citrix and Microsoft VDI. They tested all three vendor in their lab environment but added a WAN ‘simulator’ to create real life and worst case scenarios by introducing packet loss and latency.
And honestly I was surprised by some of their their conclusions. Not because I have no faith in Brian Madden but because I know Brian Madden to be a real Citrix enthusiast and a PCoIP critic. At the end he was very honest by admitting that Citrix XenDesktop looks like a mash-up of a bunch of different things, he was surprised by the simple, straightforward installation and configuration of VMware View and the good performance of PC-o-IP.
So bottom line?
VMware View shines because of simplicity and has good user experience even with PC-o-IP over a WAN connection.
XenDesktop is, at the moment, certainly the more mature and complete product but it’s complexity is a drawback.
And Microsoft ‘in box’ VDI? Well as expected, it’s complex, not enterprise ready and it’s no match for Citrix or VMware.
So as always, there is no clear winner, it all depends on the customer’s wishes.
Special thanks to Brian Madden and his team for creating this great VDI test!
I won’t summarize the total VDI test, you can read it yourself here but I will quote some of the conclusions which I found to be very interesting.
Two months ago, I heard Citrix was giving away a free VDI version called XenDesktop Express for a maximum of 10 users. The general idea is that you can experience the Citrix product advantages without investing anything but time and hardware. I downloaded it but didn’t have time to actually get some hands-on experience until last Wednesday.
Last week a colleague, who sells applications running on an Oracle Database, had some questions regarding Oracle and running it in a Virtual Machine (VM) on top of a VMware infrastructure with a customer.
1) How to license Oracle in a virtual environment?
I pointed him to an article about licensing the Oracle software in a virtual environment I wrote some time ago.
Oracle can namely be hard- and soft partitioned, where VMware, XenServer, Hyper V and Oracle VM are all marked as soft partitioning, while looking into the way Oracle VM can be hard partitioned I stumbled on the following how to do it:
There are two methods to pin virtual CPUs. You can use the xm command to pin a guests’s virtual CPUs or you can hardcode the CPU mapping in a guest’s vm.cfg file. The difference between pinning CPUs with xm and hard coding the CPU mapping in a guest’s vm.cfg file is the persistence of the CPU mapping. CPUs that are pinned with xm are not persistent between reboots. Hard coding the CPU mapping in a guest’s vm.cfg file is persistent between reboots. To comply with Oracle’s hard partitioning policy, you must hardcode the CPU mapping in a guest’s vm.cfg file.
About two weeks ago I attended a session at the VMware User Group meeting here in the Netherlands about Project VRC. After the presentation I asked myself: ‘What is the value of this project?‘.
For you who don’t know what Project VRC is:
“Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) is a joint venture of Log•in Consultants and PQR, who have researched the optimal configuration for the different available hypervisors (hardware virtualization layers). The project arises from the growing demand for a founded advice on how to virtualise Terminal Server and Virtual Desktop (VDI) workloads. Through a number of researches, Log•in Consultants and PQR show you the scaling possibilities for Terminal Server environments as well as Virtual Desktops.” http://www.virtualrealitycheck.net/
Don’t get me wrong: What they did was a very good initiative, it showed the performance differences between different hypervisors. Although the results were not that surprising it was good to see the validation numbers of the things we already knew.
I also think that the guys who did the project where totally surprised by the attention vendors and customers gave to the project. It was an outstanding (marketing) tool to show the value of virtualization and especially XenApp on a hypervisor. Because of this attention the whole project got out of hand. Although this was not the goal of the project, vendors and customers used it as a reference guide for vitalizing XenApp. That’s the point where I started to wonder what the real value of the project VRC was.
Based on the real life results when virtualizing XenApp I thought it was about time to summarize some of the best practices for virtualizing XenApp servers.
Why we DO want to virtualize XenApp?
For server consolidation: vSphere enables scale up XenApp deployments;
For mixing server editions: 32-bit and 64-bit XenApp VMs can coexist;
For management: Better management through flexibility & isolation think about Change Management and VMware DRS;
For high availability and disaster recovery: VMware HA and vCenter Site Recovery Manager;
For less costs for server hardware, maintenance contracts, power, cooling, floor and rackspace.
Virtualizing XenApp servers is very complex. There are a lot more layers involved, like the type of hardware, the capabilities of the processor, the performance of the shared storage, the hypervisor used, the specific settings per hypervisor, operating system settings in a virtual environment, the XenApp settings in a virtual environment, the Workspace management settings in a virtual environment etc, etc.
In the following sections I tried to summarize some of the best practices we use in our projects:
I do like advertising from time to time. I think advertising gives away a lot about how companies operate and what their internal values are. You also find out if the company understands their market and their potential users.
When looking for VMware View articles with Google I came across an ad for Citrix, look at the picture to the right. The ad is somewhat funny actually. Citrix says that their solution with HDX is faster than VMware View. Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t, I don’t know. It all depends on workloads, hypervisor, storage and so on.
Back by popular demand, the Enterprise Hypervisor feature comparison.
Two weeks ago VMware released the new version of their vSphere hypervisor, so it’s time to update our Enterprise Hypervisor comparison. It very impressive to see how quick VMware has reacted to the Hyper-V 3 announcements and has taken most of the wind out of the Microsoft sails.
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.
The competition in the VDI space is fierce and VMware is slowly closing the gap with the features their products are offering compared to the competition.
On the YouTube channel 
Last week we had a meeting with a McAfee Sales Engineer and he told us something I have been waiting for for a long time.
