Oracle jumped on bandwagon this week with Oracle VM (Xen based), SUN just announced xVM and $2bln investment, surprising its own users and partners who thought the money could have spent to enhance solaris zones rather than another hypervisor. Then we've got VMware who leads this race by a couple of miles right now, Xen, Virtual Iron (Xen Based), Linux KVM, Microsoft's Virtual server and its newly announced Hyper-V for Windows 2008 (aka Viridian).
Eight offerings, I'm sure I missed some, and without counting IBM's POWER hypevisor and VIOS for their P series.
With the proliferation of all these hypevisors, and no compatibility/interoperability across these how is IT suppose to manage them?
This reminds me of the late 1990s early 2000s, Fibre Channel switch wars. We had Brocade, McDATA(Brocade), Gadzoox (RIP), Vixel (Emulex), Ancor (Qlogic), Inrange (CNT/McDATA).
It wasn't until customers started screaming about interoperability and the FC-SW2 standard passed that these vendors were able to inter-operate.
A similar situation will eventually develop here. Customers will realize how disjointed this space is becoming and they will come out swinging, but that won't happen until server virtualization deployments become mainstream. So the next 2 years promise to be rather interesting with folks starting to call for a standards based hypervisor. In fact, some of these calls have already started by a few industry observers but until the customer steps in and threatens to close his/her wallet, no progress will be made. Sad but true.
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