Today at VMworld Europe in my “Hypervisor Competitive Differences: Beyond the Data Sheet” session, I had the pleasure of announcing Burton Group’s production-class hypervisor evaluation criteria. We are frequently asked by our clients for guidance with hypervisor evaluations. As a result, Richard Jones, Drue Reeves, and I spent three months developing criteria to evaluate hypervisor platforms. Along the way, we received considerable input from Burton Group’s Data Center Strategies, Security and Risk Management Strategies, and Network and Telecom Strategies services, as well as input from a number of Burton Group clients.
So what’s all the fuss about? In summary, Burton Group has defined requisite hypervisor criteria in areas such as high availability, networking, storage, and management. Burton Group considers hypervisors that are unable to meet the requisite criteria as not enterprise production-ready. We have also defined preferred and optional features as well. The complete evaluation criteria and technical justification for each, along with checklists that can be used to write RFPs, is in our 70 page Server Virtualization Hypervisors technology and standards report, which will be available the first week of April. A series of product profiles will follow the release of the Server Virtualization Hypervisors document, including analysis of Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Virtual Iron, and VMware vSphere 4.0.
I have said on numerous occasions that server virtualization is a core infrastructure technology, and as such requires a long term commitment. Our evaluation criteria will help you identify the features that really matter to your organization, and also provide the depth to differentiate between mere marketing checkboxes and enterprise-ready hypervisor features. If you would like to see a sneak preview of the evaluation criteria, take a look at my 15 minute summary presentation below. In the presentation I describe each of the required hypervisor features that were identified in the report.
Posted by: Chris Wolf
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