Windows Server 2008 R2 will help Microsoft to compete with virtualization products from market leaders VMware and Citrix Systems, but the new Hyper-V software, launched shortly, would still won’t be “production-ready” for most enterprise applications, according to Burton Group.
Burton Group confirms that VMware is still the only virtualization vendor whose hypervisor meets every enterprise requirement. 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
Despite several improvements, Hyper-V will still lack three of the 27 features that Burton Group considers requirements for most enterprise applications running in production, Burton Group analyst Richard Jones said at VMworld Tuesday.
Burton Group compiled a list of criteria for running enterprise applications in a virtual environment, including features related to high availability, live migration, memory management, security, networking, storage, licensing and power management.
Just a few months ago, VMware was the only company that met all of Burton Group’s must-have requirements. It added XenServer to the list in July following its release of XenServer 5.5.
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.
The features Hyper-V still lacks for the enterprise, according to Burton Group, are the ability to prioritize virtual machine restarts; support for a minimum of two virtual CPUs per guest operating system; and the lack of a fault-tolerant management server.
The first can be important because dependencies can exist between virtual machines, so companies may need to start them in a particular order, said Burton Group analyst Chris Wolf. The second translates to a lack of compute power: Microsoft supports more than two virtual CPUs with its newest OSes, but only two with Windows Server 2003, and one for all other operating systems, Wolf said.
On the third point, Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager can’t run on a cluster of servers, Wolf said. “Microsoft will argue that you can put it in a virtual machine and fail the VM over [to another server], but that’s not the point; it can’t be made fault tolerant,” he said.
Nevertheless, the upcoming Hyper-V release has some significant enhancements, including live migration of virtual machines; cluster shared volumes; support for third-party cluster file systems; hardware-assisted memory virtualization, and virtual storage hot-add, Jones said.
Microsoft responded to the findings by highlighting customers that it says are using its product. “Our customers have their own scorecards, and Ingersoll Rand, Jackson Energy Authority, and the University of Miami have experienced success and cost savings through using our products,” the company said via email.
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.