The Commoditization of the Hypervisor

It’s amazing; since the introduction of hardware based virtualization made possible with processor technology such as the Intel-VT and AMD-V (see prior blog The Power of Virtualization – a competitive edge), everyone and their mother is coming out with a hypervisor.

The hypervisor is starting to look very much like a commodity. The dominant player by far is still VMware which is leading in the virtualization market. Other vendors with reasonable market share are Citrix, Oracle, Red Hat, and Microsoft. Open source Xen and oVirt are also very attractive to many, especially start-ups. Xen, having really pushed the paravirtualization concept, has always been a player and is considered to be as much of a pioneer as VMware even in the early days of server virtualization. The oVirt Project is an open virtualization project you should keep an eye on if you are a virtualization guru as there seems to be a lot of potential here.

So what do I think of this cosmic flooding of hypervisors onto the market? Well I think it’s a good thing because innovation has to be pushed to a higher level. This is why the basic Hypervisor is being given away for free and vendors like VMware and Microsoft are cashing-in on the the higher-level software solution such as management software, live migration/VMotion, live storage migration/storage VMotion, security services, etc… As the software solution/service gets commoditized, the solution has to be pushed even further up to another level of innovation.

Now, if you think about it, the science is the same and can only vary so much when it comes to how to accomplish true virtualization, yet all the vendors I’ve mentioned here have found niches and areas where they offer something different or better. I’ve installed and played with some of the most popular Hypervisors including VMWare’s ESXi, Citrix’s XenServer, and Microsoft’s Hyper-V, and I have to admit they all have their pros an cons, and the fierce competition keeps the developers at their heels pushing the limits.

This is a war for sure just like with any other fast-changing technology, but it is a war that is helping push the limits of virtualization and it ends up benefiting the consumer.