SWsoft on VMware and Virtualization

So what exactly is SWsoft's take on VMware and virtualization? I wasn't sure either until I came across these two articles.

According to the Virtuozzo Blog site, SWsoft had an extremely positive experience at this year's TechEd 2006 event. Foot traffic around their booth was up from the previous year, so the company was able to communicate with a lot more of the attendees. At the conclusion of the show, the company made the following observations:

• A lot more people are using virtualization compared to TechEd 2005. 80% are using virtualization and 100% are evaluating it for deployments - compared to 50% and 60-70% respectively at TechEd 2005.


• VMware users were much more interested to alternative approaches. Last year VMware users may or may not have had the time to talk to us... this year they did.


• Hardware virtualization is still used mostly for testing and development. Only about 25% or less of the people I talked to use it in production.


• About 80% of the production hardware virtualization users mention "OS sprawl" either as a problem they're dealing with now or something they're anticipating in the near future.

Around the same time, TechWorld wrote an interesting article, "VMware too slow and expensive", where it detailed some of the thoughts of SWsoft CEO Serguei Beloussov centered on their competitor, VMware. In it, the article writes:

VMware's virtualisation software, which leads the market by a considerable margin and is fast becoming the platform of choice for server consolidation projects, is too resource hungry, too slow and too expensive, according to the boss of a much smaller virtualisation company.

Serguei Beloussov, CEO of SWsoft which sells virtualisation product Virtuozzo, has slammed the virtualisation industry's standard-bearer, saying that Virtuozzo's OS shim-style virtualisation is better than VMware's all round, in that customers can fit more virtual machines (VMs) into a server, and that it's easier to manage and so costs less to run.

Beloussov, who claimed that analysts report Virtuozzo as second on enterprises' product short-lists behind VMware, said that VMware's primary product, ESX Server, is too expensive in terms both of total cost of ownership and of hardware. This is because of the way that ESX Server works, reckoned Beloussov.

...

He then claimed - as you'd expect - that Virtuozzo was better because it suffered from none of these drawbacks. "We find customers set off to solve the problem of physical server sprawl. They then get OS sprawl - we solve that," he said. This is because, according to Beloussov, Virtuozzo consist of a shim between the OS and the VMs that allows one OS kernel to be shared across VMs. With only one kernel running, hardware and maintenance costs are lower, if Beloussov is to be believed.

...

Finally, Beloussov's comprehensive demolition job on his biggest competitor cited performance as another weakness. "VMware is I/O intensive", he said, claiming that its overhead could be 5-10x higher then that of his own product. "The problem is that you cannot find out because the VMware [license] agreement means you can't publish performance comparisons," he said.

If you want to read more of what the SWsoft CEO had to say, check out the entire TechWorld article, here.

Posted by David Marshall on June 26, 2006 04:41 PM