Thu, March 05, 2009 — CIO — VMworld Europe 2009, in my opinion, was one of the most significant virtualization conferences to date. The show featured several major vendor announcements, along with substantial buzz around VMware's forthcoming vSphere (previously called VMware Virtual Infrastructure) product release and Cisco's Nexus 1000V virtual switch. Citrix announced a free version of the XenServer Enterprise platform, along with its new Citrix Essentials product. Burton Group contributed to the excitement by announcing a complete set of evaluation criteria for enterprise-class hypervisors used in production environments, along with vendor scorecards for VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, and Virtual Iron. The evaluation criteria are organized as required, preferred, and optional features. Hypervisors must meet 100 percent of the required criteria in order to be considered enterprise production-ready.

I'm going to start with the Burton Group announcement, and then move on to my broader take on VMworld Europe as a whole. The details of our announcement were covered in Kevin Fogarty's CIO article "Virtualization Wars Heat Up Again." The bottom line—only VMware's VI 3.5 platform met 100 percent of Burton Group's required enterprise production-class hypervisor features, meaning that it is the only hypervisor we will recommend for enterprise production workloads today. As other hypervisors meet 100% of our requisite features, we will add them to our recommendation list as well, but give preference to hypervisors that meet the highest degree of our preferred criteria.

Both Microsoft and VMware have come forward and made statements in favor of the evaluation criteria.

"Burton Group is the first technology analyst firm to arm customers with an in-depth list of criteria for evaluating virtualization software," said VMware's Bogomil Balkansky, VP of Product Marketing. "This analysis shows the depth and breadth of Burton Group research expertise, and their ability to deliver substantial value to customers."

Microsoft's Patrick O'Rourke, group product manager - Windows infrastructure, made the following statement on my personal blog: "As was the case with my colleagues, we thought Burton's report was a fair representation of the primary commercial hypervisors available to customers. And as we discussed last week, we aim to 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."

Server virtualization is a core infrastructure technology, and as such, requires a long term commitment. With that in mind, it's critical for enterprises to set a bar on what's acceptable for enterprise-class virtualization hypervisors, and IT decision makers should not allow vendors to talk them out of requiring critical hypervisor features for their virtual infrastructure. Also, while the hypervisor is important, the management and vendor ecosystem that integrates with the hypervisor is vital to any virtualization architecture's long term sustainability.