Product positioning
We asked each company to differentiate its approach to virtualisation from their competitors'.
VMware's Greene said, "A very important thing is just that we've had our Intel virtual machine technology in such wide deployment for so long ... By having over 1,200 customers deploy our server technology, we've been able to gain a tremendous amount of experience about what customers want and how they expect to use our products. All that experience has gone right back into our current second generation servers, and that's why we're seeing such rapid adoption. Our success in the enterprise is due in part to our rock-solid isolation capabilities--we've even had the National Security Agency perform an audit of our source code to satisfy themselves that we have true isolation among virtual machines."
Connectix's Shaler compares his company's Virtual Server to VMware's GSX Server and ESX Server products. "While GSX and Virtual Server are similar in that they are both hosted on Windows servers, there are vast differences in terms of our superior memory management and performance optimisations associated with our balanced approach to binary translation and direct execution modes. Virtual Server performs on parity with ESX and significantly out-performs GSX. ESX and Virtual Server are both highly-scalable, enterprise-class virtualisation solutions that take very different approaches to solving a complex problem: we started with complete emulation and then optimised for performance, [whereas] ESX started with hardware virtualisation and then optimised for a more limited range of compatibility.
"Simply put, we are a Windows-hosted solution with superior compatibility and extensibility, whereas VMware is a proprietary-hosted solution, and Virtuozzo is a pure-play Linux offering."
SWsoft's Beloussov claims Virtuozzo's approach "is different from the virtual machine (VM) technologies found in offerings from VMware and Connectix in that the technology virtualises the OS layer. VMware's VM technology emulates the hardware layer, which creates serious overhead that increases proportionally [as] the number of VMs [increases]. If you are running five to fifteen VMs on a server, it's possible [for a server to] spend over half of its CPU cycles processing virtualisation, instead of a business-critical operation.
"Virtual machine technologies do not utilise hardware well--if there are 20 VMs on a single machine and 19 are idle, the remaining one will only work with up to one CPU and 4GB of RAM. [Our] VEs can use all available CPUs and RAM on the same server, dynamically reassigning resources without rebooting the system (as with a VM).
"Another advantage [of VEs] is en-masse management of partitions through sophisticated templating technology. All applications, Web pages, and anything else housed within a VE is managed in one place, with the unique ability to mass-deploy updates and migrate partitions between physical servers with little or no downtime."
However, Beloussov conceded that VM technology does offer the advantage of running disparate OSs on the same physical machine, whereas Virtuozzo currently supports only Linux.
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