Key Virtualization Advances from VMworld Europe 2009

VMworld Europe 2009, in my opinion, was one of the most significant virtualization conferences to date. The show featured several major vendor announcements, along with substantial buzz around VMware's forthcoming vSphere (previously called VMware Virtual Infrastructure) product release and Cisco's Nexus 1000V virtual switch. Citrix announced a free version of the XenServer Enterprise platform, along with its new Citrix Essentials product. Burton Group contributed to the excitement by announcing a complete set of evaluation criteria for enterprise-class hypervisors used in production environments, along with vendor scorecards for VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, and Virtual Iron. The evaluation criteria are organized as required, preferred, and optional features. Hypervisors must meet 100 percent of the required criteria in order to be considered enterprise production-ready.

I'm going to start with the Burton Group announcement, and then move on to my broader take on VMworld Europe as a whole. The details of our announcement were covered in Kevin Fogarty's CIO article "Virtualization Wars Heat Up Again." The bottom line-only VMware's VI 3.5 platform met 100 percent of Burton Group's required enterprise production-class hypervisor features, meaning that it is the only hypervisor we will recommend for enterprise production workloads today. As other hypervisors meet 100% of our requisite features, we will add them to our recommendation list as well, but give preference to hypervisors that meet the highest degree of our preferred criteria.

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