Virtualization Platform : Which Should be your choice?

Virtualization Platform choosing might be an important factor to deploy your Virtualization process. Virtualization Platform has almost synonymous to VMware.

We need to explain why we said  “Virtualization Platform has almost synonymous to VMware“. See this screenshot below. Have you ever seen such big list of sitelinks for any website? Probably not. This is because people almost always click VMWare related links or search for them.

Previously, we wrote about Virtualization Monitoring Tools, Different Virtualization Softwares like topics, you might be interested to read them.

VMware and other Virtualization Platform

It is important to understand why people prefers VMWare as Virtualization Platform over the others.

Existent Virtualization Platform offerings are overwhelming, from open source technologies to paid solutions, such as OpenVZ,  KVM , VMware ESXi , Microsoft Hyper-V or Citrix XenServer.

Obviously the answer to the question, “Virtualization Platform : Which Should be your choice?” depends directly on the particular needs and environment of the person who asks the question.

Factors to be considered for choosing your Virtualization Platform

The black whale Microsoft is dangerously coming to engulf the Virtualization Platform arena and introduce new kinds of unknown problems. There is not even a single reason to choose the host operating system other than UNIX like open source operating systems (read Linux) to deploy Virtualization Platform. Low to nil cost, robust architecture of Linux permits to run VMware like Virtualization Platform smoothly. Keep in mind, Microsoft has the bad habit of not supporting a particular operating system after a certain period. It might not be possible to shut down the whole system deploying Virtualization Platform or to run a system intense antivirus.

Do not choose  home brewed or less used Linux Distro for Virtualization Platform as you will get less documentation.

Obviously, it is your head, so you can decide how to chop it. VMware like Virtualization Platform can run on almost all host operating systems. Our choice is Red Hat Linux or Debian Linux.

So, the option of Microsoft Hyper V Virtualization Platform is ruled out. Next comes the question of Cloud environment and deploying Virtualization Platform.

Microsoft (as usually) hyping too much their Azure with “cloud, cloud”. But, as per record, VWware deployed cloud scenario much before Azure. We used Azure free test drive and it is really better to avoid it as Virtualization Platform.

Next comes the question of other Virtualization Platform like Citrix Xen-Server. From our experience, Xen provides excellent Virtualization Platform, OpenVZ is not even a bad option.