Why VMware is better than Xen or Microsoft

When Microsoft and Citrix come sniffing around your virtual infrastructure here’s some information you can give them.

So at some point your going to have to explain why VMware is better than Xen or Microsoft. You gonna need something clear, concise and to the point. You could do no wrong by have a quick look at this URL from VMware. Thank you to Jay Rogers of Novant Health for drawing this to my attention

http://blogs.vmware.com/virtualreality/2008/06/a-look-at-some.html

There’s a simple compare and contrast of the memory front prints of the various hypervisors… and a good architecture comparision.

“The architecture for Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V puts standard device drivers in their management partitions. Those vendors claim this structure simplifies their designs compared to the VMware architecture, which locates device drivers in the hypervisor. However, because Xen and Hyper-V virtual machine operations rely on the management partition as well as the hypervisor, any crash or exploit of the management partition affects both the physical machine and all its virtual machines.”

“The Xen and Microsoft architectures rely on routing all virtual machine I/O to generic drivers installed in the Linux or Windows OS in the hypervisor’s management partition. These generic drivers can be overtaxed easily by the activity of multiple virtual machines – exactly the situation a true bare-metal hypervisor, such as ESXi, can avoid.
Hyper-V and Xen both use generic drivers that are not optimized for multiple virtual machine workloads.”

“Products like Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V lack an integrated cluster file system. As a result, storage provisioning is much more complex. For example, to enable independent migration and failover of virtual machines with Microsoft Hyper-V, one storage LUN must be dedicated to each virtual machine. That quickly becomes a storage administration nightmare when new VMs are provisioned. VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMFS enable the storage of multiple virtual machines on a single LUN while preserving the ability to independently migrate or failover any VM.”

Why VMware is better than Xen or Microsoft…
Mike Laverick
Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:09:41 GMT