Scott’s post on multiple hypervisor’s got me thinking…

Regardless of workload (server, VDI, DR, Test/Dev) I myself only really see one hypervisor out there… VMware. I think so many companies have built their operational policies, processes and procedures around ESX that it is going to be an incredibly difficult migration to something else. I know of one of my customers that is running Citrix XenServer in a XenDesktop environment. Unfortunately, they are unhappy with the solution and there is talk of plans to move to an ESX based XenDesktop solution. I also know of a single customer running Microsoft Hyper-V Server. However, it is not in production or Test/Dev; it’s more of a tinkering environment and an excuse to play with Hyper-V.

Why are customers slow to move to other hypervisors? I think there are a couple other compelling reasons for customers to stick with VMware.

1. Almost all of my customers are well past 80% virtualized, making it much more difficult to back out and change direction given the investment that they already have.
2. Almost all of my customers are using other VMware products like Site Recovery Manager and vCloud Director, which utilize VMware’s ESX hypervisor at their core.
3. VMware has become “comfort food” for IT Professionals, stable, comfortable to use and familiar.

I think these three reasons alone are pretty compelling in terms of the effort (equals money) required to either introduce or replace a VMware Hypervisor environment.

With other customers that I’ve spoken to, another problem for competing hypervisors like XenServer, KVM and Hyper-V, is the price. The free, or near free price seems to subliminally  highlight the difference in feature set when compared to VMware; whether rational or not. Take into account the various State and Local EDucation (SLED) discounts, it’s almost impractical for SLED customers to not deploy VMware and the various VMware applications with the gargantuan feature set.. This, I believe, is the key component for VMware.

As for desktop virtualization aka end-user virtualization; VMware seems to keep holding ground as well. Hypervisors like XenServer and KVM are not widely supported by mainstream monitoring and management platforms (SolarWinds, EM7, etc.). Hyper-V is just recently supported by XenDesktop and is definitely not supported by VMware View. Not to mention, when purchasing View, it’s pretty advantageous to purchase View Premier as your entitled to ESX Enterprise Plus. Not only is that a great deal, but pretty much seals the Hypervisor market share for VMware View.

So that being said, what are you seeing in the general public?

Tags: Citrix, cloud, ESX, esxi, microsoft, VDI, VIew, vmware, XenServer