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Industry Trends and Perspectives: Tiered Hypervisors and Microsoft Hyper-V

This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.

These short posts complement other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageioblog.com/reports.

Multiple – Tiered Hypervisors for Server Virtualization

The topic of this post is a trend that I am seeing and hearing about during discussions with IT professionals of the use of two or more server virtualization hypervisors or what is known as tiered Hypervisors.

Server Virtualization Hypervisor Trends

A trends tied to server virtualization that I am seeing more of are that IT organizations are increasingly deploying or using two or more different hypervisors (e.g. Citrix/Xen, Microsoft/Hyper-V, VMware vSphere) in their environment (on separate physical server or blades).

Tiered hypervisors is a concept similar to what many IT organizations already have in terms of different types of servers for various use cases, multiple operating systems as well as several kinds of storage mediums or devices.

What Im seeing is that IT pros are using different hypervisors to meet various cost, management and vendor control goals aligning the applicable technology to the business or application service category.

Tiered Virtualization Hypervisor Management

Of course this brings up the discussion of how to manage multiple hypervisors and thus the real battle is or will be not about hypervisors, rather that of End to End (E2E) management.

A question that I often ask VARs and IT customers if they see Microsoft on the offensive or defensive with Hyper-V vs. VMware and vice versa, that is if VMware is on the defense or offense against Microsoft.

Not surprisingly the VMware and Microsoft faithful will say that the other is clearly on the defensive.

Meanwhile from other people, the feelings are rather mixed with many feeling that Microsoft is increasingly on the offensive with VMware being seen by some as playing a strong defense with a ferocious offense.