Three server virtualization software competition Who is the best?

Virtualization software has become more and more widely deployed on servers. Some companies have conducted surveys. Among 479 respondents, 46% deployed 51%-85% of servers in enterprises, 21%. The user has completed 100% virtualization. It can be seen that server virtualization has been recognized by most users.

Previously, when it comes to server virtualization software, people used to compare this market to the battle of the Three Kingdoms: VMware pioneers are powerful compared to Wei Guo, Microsoft’s determination to virtualize is like Wu Guo, Citrix faces VMware Power The situation with Microsoft is as good as the country. Then, the disputes in these three countries are bound to be different. The software must have its own advantages and disadvantages. For the time being, no matter what we care about, what kind of server virtualization software is right for you?

Citrix's Server Virtualization Software Xen Server

Citrix's XenServer is an open source virtualization product based on the Xen hypervisor that provides customers with an open architecture that allows customers to follow The same management method as its own physical and virtual server environment for storage management, its management tool CUI is its biggest highlight.

At the same time, XenCenter is a virtualized graphical interface management tool that manages multiple XenServer servers on the same interface. In management, a server group (Pool) is usually established in XenCenter, and then XenServer servers in the same equipment room are added.

Like most server paravirtualized products, Xen-Motion can be used when several XenServer servers are connected to the same shared disk drive and virtual files are placed there. Manually transfer virtual machines to other XenServer servers, perform host maintenance, or reduce hardware resource consumption.

Then, the system looks at Citrix's XenServer with the following features: First, XenServer is created based on the open source Xen hypervisor. As a particularly efficient technology, the Xen hypervisor system takes up very little resources. At the same time, it can provide near-native performance. XenServer leverages the Intel VT platform for hardware-assisted virtualization to provide faster, more efficient virtualized computing power.

Second, transforming the IT department into a business unit - By keeping abreast of user activities, system performance and capabilities, and IT service usage, IT departments can introduce cost-based billing models based on real-world applications. Proactively manage service level agreements (SLAs), predict capacity planning, and effectively integrate applications and servers.

Third, resource optimization, administrators can fine-grain control the CPU, network and disk, and set the priority level to provide the best performance for the virtual machine system. In addition, the latest version of XenServer uses less memory and improves the performance and scalability of the virtual infrastructure.

Fourth, dynamic workload provisioning, using a single shared operating system image, streaming technology to allocate server workloads to multiple physical or virtual servers on demand, which will greatly reduce the cost of patch and update management At the same time, it greatly reduces the storage space of the operating system and application image in the enterprise.

Because hypervisor was first used in Linux servers, XenServer and Linux maintain a high degree of integration. The maximum value of XenServer is also around Linux servers, so if users mainly use Linux servers, try to use XenServer. It will be better.

Microsoft's server virtualization software Hyper-V

Microsoft's server virtualization software Hyper-V is a system management program virtualization technology proposed by Microsoft, which is the first Microsoft to adopt similar Vmware is the same hypervisor-based technology as Citrix open source Xen. The Hyper-V design is designed to provide a more familiar and cost-effective virtualization infrastructure software for a wide range of users, which reduces operational costs, increases hardware utilization, optimizes infrastructure, and increases server availability.

Because Hyper-V uses the Hyperisor kernel architecture, Hyper-V can provide efficient inter-partition communication mechanism, and on this basis, create a high-performance virtual I/O architecture and make full use of the Windows driver model. Extensive hardware support is provided because the hypervisor can split a single server into multiple CPU and memory containers.

At present, most potential guest operating systems are not aware of virtualization. They are thought to run directly on the server hardware, so hardware simulations provided by the hypervisor are required.

An important feature of Hyper-V is the multiprocessor virtual machine. Hyper-V supports 4 CPU Windows Server 2008 virtual machine and 2 CPU Windows Server 2003 virtual machine. If the server workload requires high performance, we can consider virtualizing it with a 2 CPU or 4 CPU Hyper-V virtual machine. Of course, multiprocessor virtual machines should only be used when the workload really needs it, because having more processors introduces some additional overhead.

Microsoft has added innovative design to the Hypervisor and Windows Server 2008 kernels to prevent long-term wait conditions for spin locks. If there are long wait conditions, they will be effectively detected and deal with. We also designed the hypervisor, including the scheduler and memory virtualization logic so that they are not locked in most critical sections, ensuring that multiprocessor systems are very scalable.

It can be said that the advantage of Microsoft Hyper-V lies in the free Hyper-V. Because Hyper-V is integrated with Windows Server, it is more appropriate to use Hyper-V if Microsoft products are the main component of the system and the integration with Microsoft management tools is high.

VMware's server virtualization software ESX Server

VMware's server virtualization software ESX Server is a virtual host software for partitioning and consolidating systems in a common environment, and is also an advanced resource management function. An efficient and flexible web hosting platform.

VMware's virtualization architecture is divided into a host architecture and a bare metal architecture. A hosted architecture is an application installed on an operating system that relies on the host's operating system to support the device and manage the physical resources. The bare metal architecture is installed directly on the server's hardware and allows multiple unmodified operating systems and their applications to run in virtual machines that share physical resources.

And ESX Server can be installed directly on bare metal, and allows multiple unmodified operating systems and their applications to run in a virtual machine that shares physical resources, and then through the virtual layer of production practice, it will Processor, memory, storage, and network resources are abstracted into virtual machines, forming a layer of virtualization between the hardware and the operating system. ESX Server divides a physical server into multiple portable virtual machine environments.

VMFS (Virtual Machine File System) is a storage carrier that encapsulates ESX Server. The virtual hierarchy of ESX actually wraps the hardware. ESX creates a hardware interface layer. If all virtual machines want to communicate with the hardware, they must go through the hardware interface layer to complete the work such as memory offset conversion.

It is important to emphasize that ESX is characterized by completely wrapped hardware and does not allow programs to directly access the hardware. The virtual machine is completely isolated from the host and other virtual machines. If one virtual machine crashes, all other virtual machines will not be affected. Virtual machines will not leak data, and applications can only be encapsulated through a configured network connection: the complete virtual machine environment is saved as a single file; easy to back up , mobile and replication provide standardized virtual hardware for applications to ensure compatibility.

In ESX, virtual machine virtual device drivers are directly connected to physical device drivers in the ESX kernel. ESX virtual machines can use off-the-shelf drivers for their virtual devices. This not only provides high performance, but also provides a wider range of operating system support. However, in this model, new device drivers must be imported into the ESX kernel. To address the balance and complexity of I/O virtualization, Dell, along with partners such as Intel and AMD, as well as peripheral hardware vendors, introduced virtualization support in chipsets and I/O devices.

In addition, VMware ESX Server provides fully dynamic resource measurable control for a variety of demanding applications, while enabling server deployment consolidation and the space needed for future growth. At the same time, VMware ESX Server also provides the ability to store virtualization.

In addition to reducing the purchase and maintenance costs of the equipment due to the merger server, the VMotion technology can dynamically and dynamically migrate the system platform between the blades of each server or blade server due to the peak demand of performance. Personnel do more efficient resource scheduling and get better and safer protection. When a disaster occurs in the system, the system can be quickly restored in the shortest time.

It can be said that VMware ESX Server is enterprise-class virtual machine software for any system environment, providing unprecedented performance and operational control for mainframe-class architectures. The architecture of VMware ESX Server is based on direct execution (running user-level virtual machine encoding directly on hardware) and binary decoding (dynamic compilation of privileged level encoding), even without direct application of Linux drivers. The ESX server allows most operating systems that can execute on x86 to run on virtual machines without any modifications.

In general, server virtualization has become a consensus. For users, abstract server physical resources into logical resources, making CPU, memory, disk, I/O and other hardware become Dynamic management of the "resource pool", thereby improving resource utilization, simplifying system management, achieving server consolidation, and making IT more resilient to business changes, these are the most real benefits.

What kind of server virtualization software should be selected by specific users? Enterprises must make choices according to their own characteristics. From a small point of view, consider the support of virtualization software for processors, especially the latest Xeon 5600. The Xeon 7500 processor platform optimized for virtualization; from a broad perspective, companies need to consider the total cost of ownership (TCO), and do not blindly choose.