Interpretation of x86 server Virtualization Magic Quadrant Opportunity Challenges coexist

Tenkine Server channel Since the beginning of 21st century, when VMware released its server product line, the server virtualization of the X86 architecture has evolved into a vibrant market, and in the early years, it was almost the VMware family. But in 2006, Xen released its first commercial version, and then Microsoft released Hyper-V in 2008, and there were more and more alternatives in the market. The initial server virtualization was used to reduce costs, and later, with the advent of cloud computing, the server virtualization market warmed up again. The server virtualization market for X86 architectures is now maturing (with a market penetration rate of 75%).

Interpretation of Magic Quadrant

Gartner's Magic Quadrant has been widely recognized by the industry as the IT media, Tenkine the first time.

X86 server virtualization has become increasingly competitive, with VMware and Microsoft in absolute dominance, Oracle as a powerful challenger, and Citrix, Red Hat, Huawei and parallels as the marginal survivors.

Vmware:vmware with vsphere 5.5, vcenter Management tool memory Vmotion maintained a leading position, whether it is customer Word-of-mouth, market share, product capabilities and investor support are superior to other competitors, on the other hand, Few large companies have converted their virtualization solutions, while smaller companies are more flexible, and VMware still enjoys good growth, but growth has become less easy as the penetration of the market deepens and the pressure on competitors. It is worth mentioning that Xen is more widely used in Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and the SoftLayer public cloud.

Comment on: Although VMware is still sitting on the X86 server virtualization market, but with the popularity of cloud computing architecture, if users frequently to cloud computing infrastructure solutions, similar to the Openstack,x86 server virtualization market is not without the possibility of shuffling.

Microsoft: Microsoft has been in the market through Hyper-V and Systemcenter VMM for six years. Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V was released in 2008 and has undergone two upgrades in 2009 and 2011. Windnows Server 2012 was released in September 2012, with a significant increase in virtualization. In terms of product functionality, the gap between Microsoft and VMware is getting smaller, with the main gap being automated management, VMware SRM more automated and more tailored to the needs of large-scale disaster recovery. However, Microsoft launched the Hyper-V Recovery Manager (HRM) in 2014, a azure-hosted service that plans to extend the product advantage of Azure based data disaster recovery.

Comment: Perhaps it is too early to judge who is weak by two products, but these products are crucial to Microsoft's success in overtaking VMware.

Jie: In the past two years, Si Jie has undergone some strategic transformation, embodied in the XenServer as an important component of the PAAs strategy, in July 2013, Si Jie released the open source free version of the XenServer 6.2 and the commercial version. With the release of this new release, a lot of focus on the enterprise server level of functionality is discarded. Instead of a head-on confrontation with VMware and Microsoft over the traditional server virtualization market, it has focused on the following two markets: Cloud computing infrastructure and desktop virtualization. In the cloud computing market, Xen has become the most widely used provider of IaaS, including Amazon Web Service. Jie's goal is to pry the growth of Citrix Cloudplatform (the commercial version of the open source Apache Cloudstack Cloud Controller), currently Cloudplatform has hundreds of users. The open source cloud computing infrastructure market is at an early stage, and the most powerful competitor is OpenStack (based on KVM).

Comment: The challenge facing the OpenStack is that it is unknown how to get more allies in the context of community and business support lagging behind the competition.

Huawei: Huawei is a rookie of the Magic Quadrant for X86 Server virtualization, which started its enterprise-class business in 2011. Huawei's Fusioncloud components--fusionsphere, Fusioncube and fusionaccess, enhance the integration capability. The product is based on Xen and gradually expands its KVM based product components. Huawei's Fusionsphere products have been praised by hundreds of bric-country users. Although the main user of Fusionsphere is also a consumer of Huawei hardware devices, the application level of other x86 server users is low.

Comment: Huawei has shown an ambition to penetrate mature markets in the past three years, but it has been hampered in North America by barriers such as national security. In Asia, Western Europe and other regions, Huawei will use the advantages of operators to expand its cloud infrastructure products.

Other manufacturers: Red Hat has made remarkable progress in the field of KVM commercialization, but it still does not have the ability to confront VMware and Microsoft head-on; Oracle's virtualization portfolio is mainly for Oracle Enterprise application software services, focusing on "Oracle only" virtualization market and user needs, thus limiting its growth space; With the rise of cloud technology, parallels, a veteran virtualization vendor, is positioned in the cloud-computing service provider, lacking the foundation of a traditional enterprise-class user base and reducing opportunities in the mixed cloud market; As a company that follows VMware and Microsoft, Red Hat relies on KVM to achieve good results in the OpenStack market.

A review of the x86 server virtualization event

The x86 server virtualization Infrastructure Market is the foundation for the development of the "infrastructure modernization" and the ' cloud computing ', the two most interconnected and overlapping market trends.

Among them, the first to enter this market is VMware (for Enterprise), parallels and Open source Xen (for service providers). During the x86 server virtualization Infrastructure Market formation process, important product launches and acquisitions include:

2001, VMware launched ESX Server; SWsoft (now parallels) launched the Virtuozzo;

2003, Xen released, the same year, Microsoft acquired Connectix VM technology;

2004, Microsoft launched Microsoft Virtual Server 2005,EMC acquisition Vmware,swsoft acquisition parallels;

2005, Solaris 10 release (including containers), Novell releases SuSE Linux Enterprise 10;

2006, XenSource, XenServer and Virtual iron released;

2007, KVM release, Oracle VM release, Red Hat release Red Hat eterprise Linux5.0, the same year, Citrix acquisition XenSource;

2008, Microsoft released Microsoft Hyper-V, Red Hat acquisition qumranet;

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (Rhev) was released in 2009, and Oracle acquired Sun and virtual Iron;

2013, Huawei released Cloud operating system Fusionsphere version 3.0 ...

Comprehensive review and forecast: In the near future, the virtualization of x86 server will step into a new phase, one of the important features of this phase is that more and more enterprise key applications migrate to x86 server virtualization platform. At the same time, due to the rise of software definition data center, network virtualization, storage virtualization technology will also usher in a vigorous development.