CiRBA Inc., a leader in Placement Intelligence software, today announced the availability of packaged analysis templates that enable organizations to compare the impact of implementing Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V versus VMware-based virtualization. Using CiRBA’s analysis, organizations can quickly examine the suitability of each hypervisor for a given environment, understand consolidation ratios, longer term management considerations, and financial returns associated with each platform. CiRBA’s analysis templates for Hyper-V and VMware-based virtualization are driven by specialized Rulesets for each platform in combination with the solution’s advanced utilization analysis.

”Without this kind of analysis, organizations may be making decisions based on political drivers, existing vendor relationships, or perceived functional or performance advantages,” said Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO of CiRBA. “The reality is that each of these solutions may have an advantage over the other when considering all of the constraints in an environment.”

CiRBA provides cross-platform, multi-dimensional analysis that enables organizations to safely and cost-effectively consolidate heterogeneous environments and maximize efficiency within virtualized infrastructure through dynamic capacity management.

CiRBA’s comparative analysis templates for Hyper-V and VMware provide an unprecedented opportunity for organizations to leverage vendor agnostic analysis, empirical data, and organization-specific business and technical constraints to determine the optimal solution for any given environment. Examples of comparison points between the two solutions that extend beyond the financial impact of each technology alternative include:

• Per-guest resource limits: Hyper-V and VMware offer different per-guest maximum resource configurations, meaning the number of virtual CPUs, memory and network interfaces supported which could have a significant impact on the compatibility of each solution within an environment.
• Memory over commit: Hyper-V and VMware differ in their ability to share memory between VMs, thus making efficiency gains through “over-commitment” a differentiating factor that can have a significant impact on consolidation ratios and infrastructure design.
• Workload mobility: The two technologies differ in their support for the live migration of workloads between physical servers. The impact of this difference is not immediately obvious, however, and requires detailed analysis of process-oriented aspects of an environment. For example, the presence of restrictive maintenance windows in an environment makes live migration extremely beneficial. On the other hand, seasonal change freezes can serve to make workload migration a liability.

As with other Rulesets in the CiRBA product, CiRBA customers can access these new analysis features through CiRBA Central, a central repository of analysis rules that allows organizations to stay up to date on the latest best practices in data center optimization. CiRBA Powered Partners will also have access to these rules in order to help guide their clients through the selection of the optimal technology for their environment.

For more information on CiRBA’s comparative analysis for Hyper-V vs. VMware, contact the company at www.cirba.com