VMware hypervisor still king for enterprise-class workloads, Burton Group says

VMware is still the only virtualization vendor whose hypervisor meets every enterprise requirement, but rivals Citrix, Microsoft and Virtual Iron are closing in on that goal, according to research by the Burton Group.

VMware, long the market share leader in x86 virtualization, offers 100% of the features required to run enterprise-class, production workloads with the vSphere hypervisor.

Citrix XenServer and Virtual Iron are nipping at VMware's heels with 85% and 83% of requirements met, respectively, while Microsoft's Hyper-V lags behind with 78% of requirements met.

The Burton Group evaluates hypervisors based on an extensive list of criteria within the categories of high availability, live migration, memory management, networking, storage, security, compute, paravirtualization, management, power management, and licensing and support.

Click to see: Chart how the hypervisors stack up

The analyst firm presented its research in a teleconference this week to help customers figure out which hypervisors meet their needs, and which features are truly important as opposed to simply being "marketing checkboxes."

"Hypervisor vendors would all have you believe they are better than the other guy, but their product data sheets never tell the whole story," said Burton Group analyst Chris Wolf.

The Burton Group divided features into three categories: those required to operate production workloads; preferred features that are important but not required; and features that are simply optional.

For example, high availability capabilities including the elimination of single points of failure and scalability to at least eight physical nodes are required for production. Live migration, the ability to move running virtual machines (VM) from one host to another, is required. Other required features include support of hardware-assisted memory virtualization; support for iSCSI and Fibre Channel networked storage; and security features including role-based access controls and auditing of administrative actions.

Examples of preferred features include memory overcommit; centralized virtual switch management; an integrated firewall; centralized hypervisor patch management; automated VM provisioning, and hypervisor licensing based on each physical server instance.

Examples of optional features include automated server shutdown and start-up to conserve power; integration with third-party high availability software; and integration with storage virtualization appliances.

In addition to meeting 100% of required features, VMware holds the lead by offering more than 80% of preferred and optional features.

Citrix, at 85% of required features, falls short mainly in the security realm. Security logging and auditing of administrative actions; directory services integration; and role-based access controls are all missing from XenServer 5.0. However, directory services and role-based access control are expected to be added in the 5.5 version, Wolf said. Citrix is close to being ready for enterprise workloads, Wolf said.

Citrix offers 50% of preferred features and 58% of optional ones.