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5 Replies Latest reply: Jan 25, 2012 3:14 PM by jonathan.reeve RSS

Is multi-hypervisor support a must-have in management tools?

otherscottlowe
otherscottlowe Jan 24, 2012 12:42 PM
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Hello, fellow thwackers!

Let me ask you a question: When you look at buying virtualization management tools, whether you’re looking for tools to perform comprehensive management of the virtual infrastructure or you’re on the hunt for a robust health, monitoring and capacity management tool, how important is it to you that your tools of choice be hypervisor agnostic?

You may wonder why this would be important since the vast majority of virtual implementations happen on VMware and all of the major third party players provide VMware support first and, maybe, other hypervisors.

Here’s why:  I predict that, within the next 3 to 5 years, Hyper-V will eat VMware’s lunch.  VMware’s share of the market will plummet by double-digit percentages as Hyper-V 3.0 – and all of its goodies – makes its way into the mainstream.  Thus, the ability to support a heterogeneous hypervisor environment will be critical.

Now, before I get flamed, let me explain my reasoning with the following points:

  • At present, vSphere is far superior to Hyper-V, although I believe that Hyper-V would fit far more use cases than are in production.  With Hyper-V 3.0, Microsoft will go a long way toward shrinking the feature gap that exists between the two product and many more companies will consider Hyper-V adequate for their needs.
  • VMware has made some significant missteps and reduced the amount of trust that people have in the company.  Two key factors: The Enterprise Plus SKU that was released with vSphere 4 and vRAM-based licensing introduced with vSphere 5.  Both “enhancements” provide VMware to extract dollars from existing customers beyond normal annual maintenance.  I believe that both were nothing more than money grabs. While many also don’t trust Microsoft, Hyper-V licensing is far less complex.

Before you think I hate VMware, think again.  It’s a great product and I’ve run it in multiple environments.  However, as time goes on, I see the company facing greater challenges.  So, are you preparing for the day when VMware may no longer reign supreme?

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  • Re: Is multi-hypervisor support a must-have in management tools?
    andrewbrill
    andrewbrill Jan 25, 2012 10:24 AM (in response to otherscottlowe)
    Currently Being Moderated

    When we talk about management/monitoring the plan for long term future makes this discussion point fairly irrelevant.  As case in point for VMWARE..if your approach had been solely based on SNMP you would be out of luck today to manage/monitor an ESXi environment.  This too is likely to be the case for where HYPER-V sits in the future.

    I do not think it is at all clear that HyperV will indeed become more relevant as Application runtime VM environment becomes more popular thus stripping the OS Guest layer to its abstraction.  From a purely P2V perspective for late adopers..sure there's going to be opportunity for MS to be involved.  We also have to remember that for cloud providers as very large buyers they need supporting tools/platforms and that's where Hyper V will have an EXTREMELY long road to catch up on Security/Patch/Config management/Performance Management, etc. as compared to VMWARE.

    Moreover, for the next 2 - 3 years we will see a further deepening and domination on how EMC/VMWARE/Cisco help dominate this story through Flexpod as well as competing stories from HP/Dell/IBM with all of their focus on VMWARE. 

    One thing clear to me is that narrow market for VBOX/Parallels/XEN is going to create a dual dominating market for the moment. 

    Lastly, things change quickly with technology adoption and invention.  After 3 years we will be speaking of yet another framework adoption curve. 

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