Xen gaining momentum
As part of my job, I spend some time following the server virtualization market. A few months ago, I was talking with one of our clients, and was asked about what solutions I would recommend for building a new virtualized infrastructure. I mentioned that I thought VMWare was really the de facto leader for any broad enterprise virtualization effort, but Xen was certainly gaining some steam and might be able compete reasonably well with VMWare in the next two years. Based off what I’ve seen over the last two months (Oracle and Sun joining up in a big way, along with most major Linux vendors), I think Xen is gaining even more momentum, and probably will be competitive with VMWare for lots of virtualization needs within the next year.
I think Xen has a reasonable product line now for certain situations, but a lot of VMWare’s value is a product set honed over thousands of deployments, broad hardware support, lots of ISV support for products running on VMWare as well as add-ons products for managing VMWware environments, and a ton of community-generated information regarding workarounds and best practice patterns. Xen has a much more limited set of supported hardware and guest OSes, and an ISV community that is fairly small in size.
For “one stop news shopping” of the virtualization market, I highly recommend people set their RSS readers to follow virtualization.info.
January 29th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
Awesome. I have been reading about XenMotion and XenServer Enterprise the last few days, and I agree Xen will be able to compete in more and more situations as time goes on.
I also agree that currently Vmware is still in the lead. Thanks for the rss link, I am going to add that to my list. I am juiced about virtualization currently.