Virtualization shoot-out: Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware
The leading server virtualization contenders tackle InfoWorld's ultimate virtualization challenge
By Paul Venezia
Senior Contributing Editor, InfoWorld |
Virtualization shoot-out: Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware features
| Citrix XenServer 5.6.1 | Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V R2 | Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 | VMware vSphere 4.1 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bare-metal hypervisor | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| vCPUs per host | 512 | 512 | 512 | 512 |
| vCPUs per VM | 8 Windows / 32 Linux | 4 | 16 | 16 |
| RAM per host | 512GB | 1TB | 1TB | 1TB |
| RAM per VM | 32GB | 64GB | 256GB | 255GB |
| Memory overcommitment | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Page sharing | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Virtual NICs | 7 per guest | 8 synthetic, 4 emulated | 8 per guest | 10 per guest |
| VLAN support | Yes | Yes (but with separate guest config) | Yes | Yes |
| Guest OS support | CentOS, Debian, Red Hat, Suse, Windows | Red Hat, Suse, Windows | Red Hat, Windows | Most x86 operating systems |
| Live migrations | Yes | Yes (requires Windows Clustering) | Yes | Yes |
| Live storage migrations | No | No (but can automate with VM suspend) | No | Yes |
| Load balancing | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| High availability | Yes | Yes | Yes (but not for complete host failure) | Yes |
| Maintenance mode for hosts | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Templating and cloning | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Thin provisioned VM disks | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| VM import/export | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Snapshots | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Remote console | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| PXE boot for VMs | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Shared storage | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Storage multipathing | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Shared resource pools | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |