VMware Infrastructure - Architecture Advantages:

Well with the final birth of Hyper-v, it might be good to do a little review on the Architectural Advantages of VMware Infrastructure. Check out this article at http://blogs.vmware.com.

Some interesting parts I thought:
“The architecture for Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V puts standard device drivers in their management partitions. Those vendors claim this structure simplifies their designs compared to the VMware architecture, which locates device drivers in the hypervisor. However, because Xen and Hyper-V virtual machine operations rely on the management partition as well as the hypervisor, any crash or exploit of the management partition affects both the physical machine and all its virtual machines.”

“The Xen and Microsoft architectures rely on routing all virtual machine I/O to generic drivers installed in the Linux or Windows OS in the hypervisor’s management partition. These generic drivers can be overtaxed easily by the activity of multiple virtual machines – exactly the situation a true bare-metal hypervisor, such as ESXi, can avoid. Hyper-V and Xen both use generic drivers that are not optimized for multiple virtual machine workloads.”

“Products like Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V lack an integrated cluster file system. As a result, storage provisioning is much more complex. For example, to enable independent migration and failover of virtual machines with Microsoft Hyper-V, one storage LUN must be dedicated to each virtual machine. That quickly becomes a storage administration nightmare when new VMs are provisioned. VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMFS enable the storage of multiple virtual machines on a single LUN while preserving the ability to independently migrate or failover any VM.”

VMware Communities Roundtable Discussions:

You should try to give a listen each week to these nice roudtable discussions that happen each week with links to all the topics they discuss.

Main site is here.

VMware Infrastructure Architectural Advantages:

So with Hyper-V releasing tommorrow and the bound to happen Hyper-V is free comments (hopefully know one is falling for that one), you might need to ammunition for the less informed on why VMware is Architecturally better than those others.

Read all about it here.

Virtualization.Info's new REVIEW CENTER:

One of my heroes in the industry for sure, Alessandro Perilli is creating some very nice professional reviews of the major hypervisors. Worth a look for sure.

See more at the Review Center.

Pass-through authentification support in VC 2.5:

Just learned this great tip from the VM / ETC blog. Adjust the properties of your Virtual Center icon to pass-through your logon credentials by adding this:

-passthroughAuth -s vchostname