Leader in Virtualization

VMware

With VMware vSphere 5, VMware has raised the bar again, with improvements to existing features such as 32-way vSMP and increased I/O performance and additions of brand new, industry-first capabilities such as Profile Driven Storage, Storage DRS and vSphere Auto Deploy that competing solutions just cannot match. Independent industry experts agree that vSphere 4 had “ at least a 5 year pure technology lead” over competing virtualization platforms and with the release of vSphere 5, that gap widens even further.

Learn more about how VMware vSphere 5 is - and will continue to be – the best platform for IT and the best choice for building cloud infrastructures.

vSphere – The Recognized Leader in Virtualization

Over a decade of innovation has firmly established vSphere as the virtualization industry leader, proven with over 250,000 customer deployments. Customers trust vSphere, with its unique combination of advanced features and robust, reliable architecture, as the best platform on which to build their virtual infrastructure.

The reliability of VMware products and VMware’s overall leadership is being recognized by press and analysts alike.

VMware is “years ahead of the competition in many ways and will likely continue to lead the field for many years to come.
— InfoWorld, April 2011

Among the hundreds of awards given to VMware products over the past years, the recent InfoWorld award for Best Virtualization Platform and InfoWorld Technology of the Year 2011 stands out as it further validates VMware’s position as the best platform for IT and clearly illustrates the technology gap between VMware and its competitors

Hypervisor Architectures Do Matter

VMware’s purpose-built, thin hypervisor is designed for the sole purpose of virtualization. Competing hypervisors treat virtualization as an add-on to a general-purpose operating system “parent partition.” This mixed architecture introduces reliability concerns as the parent OS has a much larger attack surface and becomes a single point of failure. The far thinner VMware vSphere hypervisor architecture removes dependence on a general-purpose OS in the virtualization layer and requires no patching or maintenance to secure generic operating system code that has nothing to do with virtualization.

Differentiators	VMware Architecture	Microsoft Architecture	Xen Architecture
1. Hypervisor Disk Footprint	True, thin hypervisor with no general-purpose OS Impact: far smaller code size means better extremely high reliability, fewer vulnerabilities, less patching	Relies on Windows Server 2008 in Parent Partition Impact: more code to patch and secure, introduces single point of failure	Relies on Linux in Dom0 management partition Impact: more code to patch and secure, introduces single point of failure
2. Driver Model	Direct, purpose-built drivers in hypervisor Impact: more efficient I/O path, utilizes drivers hardened and optimized for virtualization	Indirect, I/O handled by generic drivers in management OS Impact: I/O bottlenecks, single point of failure from non-optimized drivers	Indirect, I/O handled by generic drivers in management OS Impact: I/O bottlenecks, single point of failure from non-optimized drivers

Virtualization Shouldn't Be Just a Feature

Competitor offerings chose to make virtualization a “feature” of a general-purpose OS. This approach makes the management OS that they depend on (the Windows parent partition in Hyper-V, and Linux Domain 0 in Xen) a potential single point of failure . Additionally, both competitor architectures use an indirect I/O design that routes all virtual machine network and storage traffic through the management OS. Rather than relying on I/O drivers known to be the least reliable component of a general-purpose OS, vSphere uses a direct I/O design that avoids bottlenecks by connecting virtual machines to host hardware with drivers embedded in the hypervisor that are specifically hardened and optimized for virtualization.

Experts believe that device driver failures are responsible for about 85 percent of crashes on Windows machines, and poorly written device drivers can also introduce security holes on an otherwise protected computer.
— MIT’s Technology Review (June 2010)”

Size Does Matter: A Smaller Hypervisor Means a Smaller Attack Surface

A smaller hypervisor code footprint reduces the attack surface for external threats and can drastically lower the number of patches required— giving you a more reliable product and a more stable datacenter. With the ESXi hypervisor at the core of vSphere, VMware has achieved by far the smallest code size of any virtualization product by completely eliminating any dependence on a general-purpose operating system or management console. By stripping out the tens of millions of lines of code required by a management OS, VMware ESXi 5 delivers a full x86/x64 virtualization platform in a tiny 144MB disk footprint.

No other virtualization platform can match the compact size and purpose-built efficiency of VMware vSphere. Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, Xen and KVM all have architectures that depend on a large general-purpose server operating system. That dependency means a flaw or vulnerability anywhere in the management OS – even in components unrelated to virtualization – puts the entire virtualization platform at risk. It also means that users of those products must cope with the more numerous and frequent patches issued to secure Windows and Linux operating systems, meaning more downtime and disruption.

The code footprint differences between VMware ESXi 5 and other hypervisors are dramatic. Citrix XenServer 5.6 and the Linux operating system it requires measures over 1GB. KVM installations require a Linux installation and are similarly sized. A typical Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V installation has a nearly 10GB footprint and the more stripped-down Windows server Core still requires 3.4GB. None of the vendors of those products have announced any plans to remove dependence on general-purpose operating systems and approach the truly thin design of VMware ESXi.

Gartner’s security analysts agree – Thinner is Better

“The lesson from all of this is that thinner is better from a security perspectiveand I’d argue that the x86 virtualization platforms that we are installing (ESX, Xen, Hyper-V and so on) are the most important x86 platforms in our data centers. That means patching this layer is paramount. With Hyper-V’s parent partition that means closely keeping an eye on Microsoft’s vulnerability announcements to see if it is affected.”
— A downside to Hyper-V, Neil MacDonald - VP & Gartner Fellow (Feb 2010)