Today we’d like to introduce a new resource: the virtualization.info Buyer’s Guide.
Our Buyer’s Guide is composed by a (growing) collection of matrixes that compares many features of many products in the same category.
Every few months we’ll update the matrixes by updating the feature-set and adding new products.
We decided to start with the two most popular categories: bare-metal virtual machine monitors (VMM), or what we traditionally call hypervisors and their management consoles, or what we may call virtual infrastructure managers.
The vendors included so far are Citrix, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, Virtual Iron and VMware.
As you’ll see the matrixes are incomplete and this is one of the reasons why we call this a beta for now.
Finding the technical specifications for every product on the market (even the most popular ones) is incredibly complex and involving the vendors to retrieve the missing details has been painfully slow so that at a point we decided to go on just by ourselves.
On bottom of every matrix you’ll find an email address where to send the missing data to complete the table if you want to help (of course also corrections and feedbacks are welcome).
Another reason why we call the Buyer’s Guide a beta resource is that we’d like to include the hypervisor (and management layer) from Sun as soon as it will be available.
We’d like to include the upcoming bare-metal Parallels Server as well, but it will depend on its release timeframe, which is totally unknown at the moment.
The third reason to call this a beta is that some products listed need an update. It’s the case for Citrix XenServer and XenCenter 5.0 and for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008.
We’ll update their feature-set in the coming weeks.
So, as you can see, the product is far from being complete at the moment. We count on our knowledgeable readership to complete the two matrixes in just a few days.
A special thanks goes to Scott Lowe who worked on this project for a long time and made it possible.
Enjoy the virtualization Buyer’s Guide beta.
Update: Due to an overwhelming demand we already updated the matrixes to include Citrix XenServer and XenCenter 5.0 as well as Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.
Thanks to all the readers that sent out feedbacks and helped to fill the matrixes for the products above.