Sunday, May 8, 2011

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.

10 comments:

Stacey said...

Pretty impressed by the caliber of intelligence on the webpage. There are a bunch of great resources here. I know I will check out this place often. Regards - Android Application Development

Mobile Casino said...

Very nice and useful information shared, this blog is very good to acknowledge yourself and to remain updated, especially your writing style is very attractive, keep it up.

android poker said...

Thanks for the sharing. Very Great article skill, Beautiful thoughts.

ipad bingo said...

Thanks a lot for sharing the tips in going for development.

android blackjack said...

Very informative and impressive article. unique information.

iphone slots said...

Fantastic blog, Love your blog.
I will share your blog with my friends. Keep it up with good work. Thanks a lot.

PokerStars Review said...

It’s a Good blog and congrats on having good Information, Keep it up! Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us!

hassan said...

Really nice blog, very informative. Thanks dude for wonderful posting. Keep it up in the future as well.
party casino bonus code

hassan said...

I really loved this post.Its very useful to everyone.
online poker community

ipad roulette said...

That is great post i like this i have bookmarked this post i will search some more about this.