Vmware is the leader in the infrastructure Virtualization space with industry’s first bare-metal X86 architecture that was launched in 2001, and now into the fourth generation of Vsphere infrastructure suite. Vsphere is now a fully mature production ready enterprise class Virtualization solution with a customer base that includes all 100 of the Fortune 100 companies. Their solution stands out in terms of reliability, scalability, flexibility and efficiency.
We’ll now see what are the key differentiators that gives Vmware its competetive edge over other virtualization solution providers like Xen or Hyper-V.
- Vmware’s greatest advantage is its bare-metal Hypervisor that lays the foundation for its Virtualization platform. The hypervisor with a small disk footprint of 70Mb and its non-reliance on any general purpose OS makes its less error prone, coupled with the direct driver model that gives it higher performance and greater virtual machine density.
- Its a highly reliable platform that gives maximum uptime advantages by making use of technologies such as distributed resource scheduling, logical resource pools, Vmotion, hot-add resources and Storage motion, HA , Fault tolerance and NIC teaming. Many competetors such as Xen or Hyper-V do not come with the complete capabilities or offers limited features compared to whats offered by Vmware.
- Vmware’s management tool or the vCenter is a comprehensive and completely SLA-driven virtualization management platform catering to all requirements of managing the datacenter such as cluster and resource pool management, BCDR setups, DRS, HA and Fault Tolerance, Vmotion rules, patch management, vmSafe and vShield zones and distributed virtual switch and NIC teaming rules.
- Vmware also offers the largest hardware compatibility list compared to other competitors supporting more than 1000 servers, 500 HBAs, 300 network I/O cards and more than 53 guest operating systems, the highest in the industry. It also has partnership alliances with more than 400 enterprise software vendors giving it the broadest support for applications.
- Though Vmware’s per license costs may look to be more expensive than Xen or Hyper-V solutions, on the long run Vmware offers unparalleled Return On Investment (ROI), lowered capital expenditures (Capex) and reduced operating expenses (Opex) in the data center and above all, lower cost per application by utilizing features such as CPU and memory Over-Commit,transparent page sharing, thin provisioning of virtual disks giving Vmware a very high VM density ,better performance and consolidation ratios.
Vmware is by far the most trusted and reliable Virtualization platform available now for production systems and reported by Garnet as the leader in this industry. The stability of Vmware was rightly said by Redmondmag.com that the least stable part of ESX is usually the administrator. The code is virtually bomb-proof. Citrix Xen and Hyper-V are catching up with their virtualization features but still comes with a lot of limitations that needs to be taken care of to bridge the gap with Vmware.
