Top Ten Server Virtualization Technologies to Consider

White Paper
TOP TEN CONSIDERATIONS
FOR CHOOSING A SERVER VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGY
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Published: July 2006Revised: July 2006Table of Contents
Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 3Technology Overview .......................................................................................................................... 3Ten Considerations ............................................................................................................................... 4 -Management Tools ....................................................................................................................... 4 -Virtualization Level ........................................................................................................................ 4 -Performance ................................................................................................................................ 4 -Density ......................................................................................................................................... 5 -Platform Support .......................................................................................................................... 5 -Migration ..................................................................................................................................... 5 -Resource Management ................................................................................................................ 5 -Isolation & Security ....................................................................................................................... 6 -Intended Virtualization Deployment .............................................................................................. 6 -Capabilities and Performance Comparison ................................................................................... 6Server Virtualization Evaluation Worksheet ........................................................................................... 7Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................... 7
© SWsoft Professional Services 2Introduction
The playing field for server virtualization has become much more crowded over the last few years. Com-petition is always good for a market as more choices always push vendors into providing better products at more competitive prices. It can be very time consuming to digest each vendor's marketing materials to come to the right solution for your organization. This checklist provides a list of the main considerations and basic differences between the technologies to provide a starting point for technology evaluation. The three main technologies discussed in this analysis are: hardware virtualization, para-virtualization and OS virtualization.
Technology Overview
HARDWARE VIRTUALIZATION
Hardware virtualization is probably the most commonly known technology, including products from VMware, Parallels and Microsoft. The technologies are designed to support multiple types of OSs on a single server and are characterized by technology that virtualizes hardware resources in order to manage and dedicate them to Virtual Machines on the server.
PARA-VIRTUALIZATION Para-virtualization is similar to hardware emulation because in concept it is designed to support multiple OSs on a single server. The only implementation of this technology today is the Xen open source project. Xen customizes the operating system to provide more efficient processing and lower overhead which results in better performance than hardware emulation.
OS VIRTUALIZATION OS virtualization is a third approach to virtualization and has been implemented by SWsoft's Virtuozzo and Sun's Solaris Containers. The concept is based on a single OS instance, which provides a leaner more efficient architecture and a single OS per server for management and updates.The main limitation is that it does not support multiple OSs on the same server so it is intended for organizations that are consolidating or deploying multiple virtual servers on a single Linux, Windows or Sun physical server; Solaris Containers obviously supports Solaris while Virtuozzo supports... [download for more]