Quoting from TechWorld:
VMware’s virtualisation software, which leads the market by a considerable margin and is fast becoming the platform of choice for server consolidation projects, is too resource hungry, too slow and too expensive, according to the boss of a much smaller virtualisation company.
Serguei Beloussov, CEO of SWsoft which sells virtualisation product Virtuozzo, has slammed the virtualisation industry’s standard-bearer, saying that Virtuozzo’s OS shim-style virtualisation is better than VMware’s all round, in that customers can fit more virtual machines (VMs) into a server, and that it’s easier to manage and so costs less to run.
…
On the other hand, VMware reckons its approach is more robust. With Virtuozzo, if the OS kernel falls over, all the VMs are wiped out. This not possible with VMware’s ESX Server because each OS is self-contained and runs above a VMware hypervisor.“VMware is I/O intensive”, he said, claiming that its overhead could be 5-10x higher then that of his own product. “The problem is that you cannot find out because the VMware licence agreement means you can’t publish performance comparisons,” he said.
Read the full article at source.
This article’s affirmations should be read in pair with SWsoft reporting about Microsoft TechEd 2006 attendees interest in Virtuozzo.
Claims about performances are very interesting: while VMware licensing prevents public publishing of benchmark comparison (something could change soon), I would be glad to read any SWsoft internal analysis and testimony to virtualization.info readers what I found out.