For more than a decade we've been talking about the skirmishes that have made up the hypervisor wars. But now much of the virtualization community has moved beyond that discussion, dubbing the hypervisor as more of a commodity play, and is instead looking toward the cloud.
VMware vSphere is still considered the dominant hypervisor platform when it comes to market share, but those numbers have been dwindling over the years. Some researchers claim the current VMware market share number to be somewhere around 55 percent, and Microsoft Hyper-V has been steadily making up ground with each new release. Yet even as VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix continue to innovate and throw marketing FUD at one another, there is still enough meat left on the bone for other would-be contenders -- Red Hat, Oracle, and Parallels, to name a few -- to advance their own hypervisor technologies.
So if the hypervisor war is really over (or at least winding down), is there room for yet another new hypervisor? If so, you might want to take a look at the latest release of FreeBSD announced this month.
This new version of FreeBSD is the first major update to the open source server operating system in two years, since FreeBSD 9.0 was officially announced. The project is one of the earliest open source operating system projects, tracing its roots back to the original works performed at the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1990s, so it certainly has the credentials to capture interest.
FreeBSD 10 is by all accounts a solid release. It contains major improvements in the kernel, better multimedia and networking hardware support, ZFS TRIM support for solid state disks, the deprecation of GCC in favor of Clang, support for LZ4 compression in ZFS, and official Raspberry Pi support. It also adds driver support for better performance as a guest operating system on VMware and Microsoft virtualization platforms. Other improvements can be found in the product's release notes.
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Read the entire InfoWorld Virtualization Report article.