| Hypervisor Attributes | VMware ESXi 5.0 | Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 with Hyper-V | Citrix XenServer 5.6 FP1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small Disk Footprint |  144 MB disk footprint (VMware vSphere Hypervisor) |  >3GB with Server Core installation ~10GB with full Windows Server installation | >1GB |
| OS Independence | No reliance on general purpose operating system (VMware vSphere Hypervisor) | Relies on Windows 2008 in Parent Partition | Relies on Linux in Dom0 management Partition |
| Hardened Drivers | Optimized with hardware vendors | Generic Windows drivers | Generic Linux Drivers |
| Advanced Memory Management | Ability to reclaim unused memory, de-duplicate memory pages, compress memory pages | Only uses balloning. No ability to de-duplicate or compress pages. | Only uses balloning.No ability to de-duplicate or compress pages. Does not adjust memory allocation based on VM usage. |
| Advanced Storage Management | Lacks an integrated cluster file system, no live storage migration | Lacks an integrated cluster file system, no live storage migration, storage features support very few arrays | |
| High I/O Scalability | Direct driver model | I/O bottleneck in parent OS | I/O bottleneck in Dom0 management OS |
| Host Resource Management | Network traffic shaping, per-VM resource shares, set quality of service priorities for storage and network I/O | Lacks similar capabilities | Lacks similar capabilities |
| Performance Enhancements | AMD RVI, Intel EPT large memory pages, universal 32-way vSMP, VMI paravirtualization, VMDirectPath I/O, PV guest SCSI driver | Large memory pages, 4-way vSMP on Windows 2008 and Windows 7 VMs only | No large memory pages, no paravirt guest SCSI device, Requires inflexible SR-IOV |
| Virtual Security Technology | Enables hypervisor level security introspection | Nothing comparable | Nothing comparable |
| Flexible Resource Allocation | Hot add VM vCPUs and memory, VMFS volume grow, hot extend virtual disks, hot add virtual disks | Nothing comparable | Nothing comparable |
| Custom image creation and management | VMware Image Builder allows administrators to create custom ESXi images for different types of deployment, such as ISO-based installation, PXE-based installation, and Auto Deploy. | Nothing comparable | Nothing comparable |
| Auto Deploy | vSphere Auto Deploy enables faster provisioning of multiple hosts. New hosts are automatically provisioned based on rules defined by user. | Requires in-depth setup in Systems Center Configuration Manager | Nothing comparable |
| Management Interface Firewall | ESXi Firewall is a service-oriented and stateless firewall that protects the ESXi 5.0 management interface. Configured using the vSphere Client or at the command line with esxcli interfaces. | Nothing comparable | Nothing comparable |
| Enhanced Virtual Hardware | 32-way virtual SMP, 1TB virtual machine RAM, Non hardware accelerated 3D graphics, USB 3.0 device support, Unified Extended Firmware Interface (UEFI). | 4-way virtual SMP only, 64 GB RAM per virtual machine | 8-way virtual SMP only, 32 GB RAM per virtual machine |
Sunday 18 September 2011
Virtualization Comparison Chart
VM Comparison
Note: some of the ESXi features included are not available with vSphere Hypervisor
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