All Things Virtualization 
Despite the recent Cisco, EMC, VMware announcement, the reality is that the majority of the market will continue to buy virtualization offerings from the likes of the major “piece part” suppliers – Dell, HP, IBM, etc., and that is perfectly fine. There is a more aggressive, higher-end customer base who will desire, then require, the likes of the VCE coalition to move them to the next level. Over time, IBM, HP, Dell, and others will develop their own initiatives and capabilities aimed at this slice of the market, but the fact is they will be just fine continuing to serve the more mainstream markets.
A recent hypervisor poll on ESG’s analyst Steve O’Donnell’s site The Hot Aisle indicated some interesting data regarding the use of multiple hypervisors:
96% of respondents use at least one hypervisor
44% of respondents use two or more hypervisors
16% of respondents use three or more hypervisors
Choosing to deploy multiple hypervisors should come as no surprise as IT operations:
- Try to keep pace with virtualization deployment demand, but is cost constrained and unable to purchase additional licenses, infrastructure and services to support their initial goals. IT begins thinking of a tiered strategy to maintain production workloads on their existing virtualization platform and use another hypervisor for test/dev and staging.
- Recognizes that the feature and performance gap has closed to the point that there is more than one choice for production workloads.
- Contend with licensing and support costs leading them to explore free solutions.
Citrix has even recently announced project “Open Door” in an effort to encourage existing VMware customers to jump ship and deploy XenServer or Hyper-V.
“Through March 2010, customers who switch existing VMware servers to XenServer or Hyper-V, and add Citrix Essentials™ for advanced virtualization management, will receive additional technical support, training, and conversion tools from Citrix at no cost.”
As a result of this week’s Cisco, EMC, VMware news, I’m willing to bet that Citrix and Microsoft are having some productive conversations with Dell, HP, and IBM behind closed doors. They will never get out to the public and nor should they, but I suspect they will impact the market over the next 6 – 12 months.
Related posts:
- Everyone is asking…Citrix XenServer? Microsoft Hyper-V? VMware ESX?
- Desktop Virtualization Strategies: Citrix, Microsoft, VMware
- VMware, EMC, Cisco, HP, IBM and Dell Target x86 Workloads
- Will Hyper-V exceed VMware ESX production workloads?
- Is Microsoft Hyper-V ready?
Tags: Citrix, Dell, EMC, HP, Hyper-V, IBM, Microsoft, VCE, VMware, XenServer
blogs
Hi Mark,
The VCE coalition between EMC, Cisco and VMware, and the new joint venture Acadia, raise many questions that are not clearly defined in the coalition or new venture partnership. It’s appears they’re selling a vertical stack, like a reference architecture. I will assume based on the 3 vendors involved that the business model is high price, relatively low volume (meaning, they won’t target small business, mid-sized businesses), and they will focus on direct selling to government and large enterprise datacenters. That’s the only way (it seems to me) the large SIs could make enough margin to repeat this architecture in their business models.
And I’ll take your your bet – we ALWAYS have productive conversations with Dell, HP and IBM
.
[...] VMware Opens the Door for Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V Despite the recent Cisco, EMC, VMware announcement, the reality is… [...]