Gartner: Oracle & VMware Tied For Most Secure Hypervisor?
I was reading an interesting article from James Maguire from Datamation that outlined various competitors in the virtualization platform space.
In the article, James referenced a Gartner slide that comparatively summarized hypervisor selection criteria including the maturity of features, pricing, management and ultimately security. Unfortunately the presentation source of the slide was not cited, but check this out:
What I found very interesting was the security section which equated the security capability/maturity criteria of Oracle with that of VMware while at the same time demonstrating that the overall maturity/stability of Oracle was not has highly ranked.
Since Oracle's hypervisor is based upon Xen and Citrix/XenSource is not ranked as high, it leaves me scratching my head.
Given that this chart references hypervisor selection to YE08, it more than likely does not take into consideration the coming vNetwork/VMsafe API's; it's unclear if this section is a measure of VMM "security" based upon published vulnerabilities, an assessment of overall architecture, the availability of security solutions in the ecosystem…
This is a very interesting assertion and I'd really like to get the entire document that describes how this was quantified and what it means. Anyone know which report this came from?
/Hoff
ID #: G00154925
"Server Hypervisor Competition in 2008"
Publication Date: 13 March 2008
Hoff,
As you can see from Adam's comments it's from an older Gartner report. There's actually a more recent version of this table that does a better job of distinguishing stuff and also showing true market share. Unfortunately I can't hand it out but you can contact Gartner for a copy. At any rate, I believe the reason Oracle scored higher than Citrix is they use Oracle Enterprise Linux (aka "Unbreakable Linux") for dom0. That's my guess at least.
same goes for Virtual Iron by the way, also based on Xen… I had the same feeling with this report though. And the numbers can't be right. Only 1M of vm's for VMware? And pricing depends on the features one would want to include in the package.
Short update. Gartner actually contacted the Virtual Iron article author and published the more current chart.
Here's the updated article with the chart: http://www.itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/art….
Here's the Gartner report it came from: http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=622711.
Wow, that's, um…interesting:
"[Editor's note: at Gartner's request, Datamation has replaced the chart originally posted in this article with a more recent chart.]"
The conversion from # of clients to marketshare % sort of derails the whole VirtualIron "freight train" argument given it's whopping 1% marketshare compared to 89% of VMware…
Thanks, Mike.