The blogs are a buzzing with talk about the “Thrilla in California”. Billed as a boxing match about hypervisor performance between VMware’s Scott Drummonds and Citrix’s Simon Crosby. It’s about 40mins long this video and you can watch the whole thing here:

http://www.catalyst.burtongroup.com/Na09/PlayerVideo011.html

I was quite put off by Crosby’s approach. Billed as discussion about the scaleability of the companies competing hypervisors – he seemed more keen to make an issue of VMware EULA and costs – than to actually talk technical about the capabilities of ESX vs Xen. To be honest I was surprised to hear the first issue being raised, as I thought/assumed that the restriction on people publishing performance data about ESX had been lifted long ago. Back in June 2006, Richard Garsthagen  (now VMware’s EMEA Senior Evangelist) made it plain that this restriction had been limited within Vi3:

http://www.run-virtual.com/?p=123

“You may use the Software to conduct internal performance testing and benchmarking studies, the results of which you (and not unauthorized third parties) may publish or publicly disseminate; provided that VMware has reviewed and approved of the methodology, assumptions and other parameters of the study. Please contact VMware at benchmark@vmware.com to request such review.”

Is that restrictive? Or is just there to stop any old tom, dick and harry putting together bogus performance reviews?

Anyway, only this week I had student who had formerly been a Virtual Iron customer – who because of the untimely murder of the product by Oracle – is now looking for alternatives. He’d checked out Citrix Xen but abandoned it because of the bottleneck that Partition0 introduced…

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Citrix, ESX. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.