Hi Folks
I thought this is a reasoned (for once) and decently written informative article --not a sales pitch that we so often get from "Pseudo Technical" articles written in such places like PC magazine etc.
Anyway enjoy -- you don't have to agree with it but I found it merits a read.
The Real Threat to VMware: KVM -- Virtualization Review
Cheers
jimbo
They say KVM is being adopted in the mass market. I think that is bs - does anybody even know anybody who uses KVM (apart from you I am guessing)?
It may have a good penetration in the linux market but as far as I can tell this is not a tool for beginners. In the Windows market, clearly virtualbox/vmware are market leaders for Home users and Hyper-V for Pro users etc.
You say article is reasoned and informative - I thought pretty much the opposite - lots of words but no backup evidence or substance.
Hi there
I think that's the point - It isn't intended really for the Home market -- there's utterly no reason for it - unless you like "Tinkering" etc.
What it does show that companies who use loads of servers etc might (and do) save themselves oodles of dosh by looking at solutions based on KVM rather than the fairly substantial costs incurred by using VMWARE.
On the Windows side using the Ms AZURE cloud for businesses isn't cheap either -- if robust (stable) cheaper solutions can be found then there is a HUGE market for this stuff.
The base KVM is simply Linux's version of a built in hypervisor akin to Windows HYPER-V - loads of companies providing computing infrastructure via individualized servers to their clients use masses and masses of VM's - Red Hat is an example of a hugely successful company providing service like this.
The world's open source leader
The idea of course is to have the "bare metal" Os'es to consume as minimal resources as possible giving the GUESTS maximum flexibility with hardware and performance. The hosting company has all the servers while the client companies run their computing infrastructure on the personalized Guest OS'es.
Again this is of very small significance to a typical Home user running a few VM's for learning / enjoyment or whatever - but is of very great commercial relevance in the business world -- especially these days where even saving a few cents per device means either making loads of money or going bust.
Cheers
jimbo
From an end users perspective, running a hypervisor on their own local machines, VMWare and Hyper-V are still much better.
It's true that some companies are finally starting to provide turnkey KVM solutions for the enterprise, but those solutions still fall behind in areas such as storage management (VMWare's vMotion and Hyper-V's Live Motion). KVM has something called savevm and loadvm, which is a lot more complex to manage than either of the other solutions.
It is improving rapidly though, and may soon achieve some level of feature parity. However, these enterprise solutions are just as expensive as the commercial ones, and the whole "open source" argument is irrelevant since it's not really free (cost-wise, which is the only real reason most enterprises use open source in many cases).
I have not seen a business using KVM. I have seen Vmware, some Hyper-V, AWS and some talk about Azure.
Yeah but way article was written, it sort of implied otherwise.
I just get irritated by articles that do not back it up with some real statistics. Mind you, 95% of all statistics are made up.
I could see this is worrying for VMWare - probably less so for Virtualbox?
Hard to say what impact it would have on the MS Server market?
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