kvm and xvm, despite different underlying technologies, are pretty similar. They get the job done, but they aren't much fun to manage. The various crowds are making it better, everyday (eucalyptus, which uses Xen on Linux, is especially promising, but personally untested).
VMWare wins the management crown, hands down. Highly complex configurations, an abundance of tools, simple administration, and well-known in the industry.
They need to be doing a lot more, though. MS' Hyper-V 2.0 promises to have live migrations (a big selling point for VMWare), and is nearly as easy to manage. It won't take long for MS to catch up, and it is almost free with Windows.
Here's something that kills me for all of them, though. It can be difficult to move VMs from one version of the software to another version, which kills flexibility. If I want to run the VM on my laptop on a big fat server for awhile, moving it from the workstation version to the server was not simple.
It should be simple. I realize that if I wanted to do something similar on a large scale, I could do it by implementing some conventions and standards, with a bunch of scripts to hold it together. I'm lazy. That's the point here.
My Hypervisor Grail is this: a seamless transition from any hardware, to any hardware. At the moment, I'm whining about moving from my laptop to a server, but I'd like to be able to move it out to a cloud of some flavor also (right now, I'm using AWS EC2, and it is sufficient).
It would be super-cool if I could choose among images at boot, and have it backed up at shutdown, without the compromise of hard drive space and/or performance.
We're getting there, at least:
Xen 3.3 also contains a wealth of new features contributed by vendors collaborating in the new Xen Client Initiative (XCI), a Xen.org community effort to accelerate and coordinate the development of fast, free, compatible embedded Xen hypervisors for laptops, PCs and PDAs. The XCI is targeting three use cases: using Xen to run "embedded IT" VMs that allow remote support, security and service of PCs through embedded IT applications without any impact on the user's primary desktop OS;
"instant on" applications that can be immediately available as separate VMs from the user's primary desktop OS; and "application compatibility" VMs, which allow legacy PC applications to run as VMs, alongside the user's primary desktop OS. XCI member companies are already shipping Xen client hypervisors embedded in chipsets, PCs and laptops.
I think, for my next build-out, I'm going to try Eucalyptus on a server (sacrificing the Win2008 machine - good OS, but not as good as Solaris, which stays and gets big fat hard drives). I like the idea of being able to push VMs from inside the datacenter (okay, in this case, my closet) to the cloud.
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