The quest for the ideal virtualization strategy

Virtualization is steadily becoming more widespread and its use is redefining the standards for datacenter deployments throughout the industry. It allows for a true separation of hardware and software, and allows us to easily clone, snapshot, migrate, and redeploy instances of our machine images.

Virtualization is a hot topic, and there are certainly plenty of options. To name a few:

Datacenter deployments:

• VMWare vSphere (ESX, ESXi, vCenter)
• Citrix XenServer
• Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
• MS Hyper-V

Cloud deployments:

• Amazon EC2
• Google App Engine
• Rackspace

Depending on your feature and security requirements, you can narrow this list. Consider the following table:

	VMWare	Xen	KVM	Hyper-V	EC2	AppEngine
Own Hardware	√	√	√	√	X	X
Commercial Support	$	$	$	$	$	$
Paravirtualization	√	√	√	√	n/a	n/a
Live Migrations	$	?	?	?	?	?
Live Snapshots	$	√	√	√	?	?
HA / Failover	$	?	?	?	√	√
Centralized Management	$	$	?	$	√	√
Power Mgmt (iLOM)	$	?	?	?	n/a	n/a

There are many more features to list here, and I clearly have some research to do. I will try to revise this list often. The point to take away from this though, is that the more enterprise-class features you need, the more you spend. And the more likely you are to end up with a mature product like VMWare. But that doesn't mean that all options shouldn't be considered. When designing a solution, the most cost-effective option is going to be the winner.

Here is a pretty nice feature comparison of VMWare vs Citrix XenServer, but since it is a Citrix document, it is biased of course.