VMWare’s ESX differs from Hyper-V and Xen in that it currently uses pure software based virtualization, so it doesn’t need the VT or Pacifica extensions. However, it has a much tighter environment as to what kind of hardware it can run on – the hypervisor has a limited device driver compatibility list and VMWare keeps its ESX hypervisor source code very close to the vest, so development goes at a much slower pace – SATA disk drives, which are now commonplace on commodity x86 server machines, are not currently supported in VMWare ESX 3. ESX Server also requires a special networked clustered file system known as VMFS to store the virtual machine images, and you have to dedicate a SAN-based LUN to it.
Hyper-V, on the other hand, will run on any modern system that can run 64-bit Windows 2008, stores all its virtual machines on regular directories in NTFS, and provides third-party and built-in driver support by using what is referred to a “Parent” OS as a pass-thru mechanism.
In Xen parlance, this is also referred to as “Domain 0”, where device and file system support is provided by the Linux kernel (or in the case of Sun xVM, Solaris) and Linux file systems such as ext3 and ReiserFS.
Even though Hyper-V is still pre-1.0 code, but Microsoft has done a bang-up job with its hypervisor, and it may just turn this Linux freak into a Windows 2008 junkie for running his own personal virtualization needs. While VMWare’s ESX is still superior on a number of fronts, including its aforementioned VMotion technology, VM migration/load balancing and it’s more powerful cluster management tools.
Hyper-V enables:
· Server Consolidation
· Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
· Testing and Development
· Dynamic Data Center
· New and improved Architecture
· Broad OS Support
· Symmetric Multiprocessor (SMP) Support
· Network Load Balancing
· Quick Migration
· Virtual Machine Snapshots
· Scalability
See More:
- Server Virtualization
- How it Works – Server Virtualization
- Example of Server Virtualization
- Hypervisors, Xen, VMWare, Hyper-V
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