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2012 – Year of Hypervisor Heterogeneity

Contributed Article by Bryan Semple, CMO, VKernel

For 2012, we expect to see significantly more environments running multiple hypervisors.   There are a couple of data points that lead us to this conclusion.

First, multi-hypervisor environments are getting a toehold.  Last year, we started to see some Hyper-V deployments, but only rarely.  These accounts tended to be 100% Hyper-V accounts and had sworn off VMware for a variety of reasons.  This year, the frequency of Hyper-V deployments markedly increased.   An article in Network World by Tim Green reported:

This flurry of improvements is in addition to progress Hyper-V has been making against ESX in licenses issued. Hyper-V grew 62% last year compared to ESX's 21% growth and Citrix's 25%, according to IDC. Separately, Gartner projects that by next year Hyper-V will account for 27% of the market, up from 11% two years ago. Within that projected 27%, Gartner says Microsoft will have captured 85% of all businesses with less than 1,000 employees that use virtual servers.

And at the latest Gartner DataCenter conference, a tweet by Chris Wolfe of an audience poll showed:

The numbers above add up to more than 100% since many people are deploying multiple hypervisor types.  Hence, there is evidence that heterogeneous hypervisor environments are starting to grow in addition to the pure play Hyper-V or KVM environments.

In 2012, there are three events that will accelerate hypervisor heterogeneity (say this 10 times fast at your holiday party).  Windows Server 8 may theoretically launch.   Red Hat RHEV 3 is in beta and we can surmise should ship next year. These two changes will start to increase the competitive pressure on VMware from both a functionality and pricing standpoint.

The final event that will impact virtualization market share has been going on for some time - Moore's Law.  When VMware announced the VTAX this year, then quickly lowered it, VMware delayed the price increase levied on their customers for a short time.  In 2012, Moore's law will make even higher density memory configurations more affordable.  Hence the amount of VMs and vRAM associated with a single vSphere license server will only go up with some customers starting to bump into vTAX overheads. 

vTAX is somewhat like the US Federal Governement's AMT tax (vAMT?).  It was originally designed to find high end tax payers who escaped paying too little taxes through deductions when it was enacted in 1982. But as incomes have risen, more and more taxpayers are impacted by AMT.  The vAMT will impact more and more virtualization admins due to Moore's law.  The vAMT will also create more momentum for companies to diversify their hypervisor portfolios.

So that is 2012 - more hypervisors and more competition for VMware.

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About the Author

A 15+ year high-tech veteran, Bryan has spent the last 8 years working in server and storage companies focused on virtualization technologies. Semple comes to VKernel from NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) where he was the general manager of the storage virtualization business unit. Under his leadership, the group experienced record growth, expanded engineering operations to India, and built global awareness for NetApp’s industry leading storage virtualization solutions. Prior to NetApp, Bryan was VP of Marketing at Onaro where he established the company as a leader in storage management software and built the marketing processes that supported the company’s profitability and successful acquisition by NetApp in 2008. Before Onaro, Bryan was the VP of Product Marketing and Strategy at server blade virtualization pioneer Egenera. At Egenera, Bryan worked with early adopters of infrastructure and server virtualization technologies in the financial services industry as the company scaled from one to several hundred customers. Early career experience includes various sales and marketing management positions at FairMarket, Trellix and Sybase. Bryan holds a BS in Systems Engineering from the US Naval Academy and an MBA from Stanford University.