Virtualization Wars Heat Up Again

CIO — The virtualization marketing wars that heated up the summer competition among VMware, Microsoft and Citrix, then dampened and cooled with the winter weather, are heating up again.

Last week, when VMware was busy hosting its VMworld Europe trade show in France, Citrix and Microsoft announced a series of new products that not only cement their alliance against VMware, but also plug many of the holes each suffers individually in comparison with VMware, according to Chris Wolf, a senior analyst for Burton Group.

Red Hat used the same week to announce a whole new line of open source virtualization tools. Oracle is throwing signs that it's ready to jump into virtualization in a more serious way as well.

Linux-market analyst Katherine Egbert, of financial-analysis firm Jefferies & Co. published a report Monday that read, in part: "multiple industry sources seem to indicate that Oracle will soon improve its server virtualization management capabilities by purchasing privately held Virtual Iron."

Oracle's previous effort on the virtualization front was to include an open-source hypervisor customers could use under its stack of applications. Buying Virtual Iron, the fifth-largest server virtualization vendor, Egbert noted, would be a way to improve Oracle's position in the virtualization market overall.

What's VMware's best response to static from competitors? Its technology is speaking for itself at the moment. Burton Group's Wolf recently authored a report that laid out the features required for a virtualization infrastructure product designed to operate as a critical part of an enterprise data center, comparing the main offerings. (See a summary of Wolf's findings in presentation format, here.)

VMware's ESX was the only product that passed the test, Wolf says.

It's not the only product close to passing the test. In each of the categories there were features listed as required and others as optional. ESX met 100 percent of the requirements, but other products did fairly well, too, he says.

Not even VMware issued an official response to the Burton Group evaluation, though Wolf says there was plenty of back-channel discussion. Microsoft Hyper-V honcho Patrick O'Rourke, a frequent contributor to Microsoft's virtualization-team blog, came closest to an on-the-record response in a comment he posted on Wolf's blog, promising that Microsoft will "prove that our collaboration with Citrix, Novell and Red Hat, as well as new features in WS08 R2 and SCVMM r2, will improve Microsoft's position in Burton's report."

"I'm not at liberty to say who will make it next," Wolf said. "But by June another hypervisor will meet at least the required criteria."

Continue Reading