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VMWare and Virtualization Technology (VT)

By shiraj ⋅ March 30, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Hello everyone,
Over the weekend I’ve been looking at the VMWare and tracking their share price over last months, thinking should I be investing in VMWare?  i.e getting engineers to do VCP certification, investing more time and money?

On VMWare forum people are talking about "VMWare are spending so much money on free food and big bonuses on their staffs, thinking they are Google. And they missed their numbers last quarter because of that. See, they try to compete with Google and try stealing Google engineers by spending needless revenues. Poor management and planning!"

VMWare was the first to virtualize x86, thats all they claim to have done with virtualization. Never once did they discount what IBM did with LPAR. VMWare set the bar, and high, for virtualization on x86. Microsoft sure hasn’t reached that bar and Xen might be close, but I really can’t say much because I haven’t seen XenServer from Citrix. However reading forums Xen users are saying, the really important stuff is still on VMW. Citrix has a ways to go to catch up, but they very nicely fit the mid market and smaller guys.

What I can say VMWare doing a lot of free stuff but the virtualization that will come pocketed with Linux distributions will not have the capabilities that a VMWare Enterprise license gives you - those will always be features you have to pay for.

Next reporting day for VMWare is in April, lets see what happens.

Software utilizing VT

The following software is known to conditionally make use of virtualization technology features:
Blue Pill (malware) uses AMD Pacifica
Hyper-V - Windows Server Virtualization
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) - a Linux kernel module
Microsoft Virtual PC — As of Virtual PC 2007 supports both Intel VT-x and AMD AMD-V.
Microsoft Virtual Server — Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 supports hardware assisted virtualization.[8][9]
Oracle VM - uses the Xen hypervisor
Parallels Workstation and Parallels Desktop for Mac — lightweight hypervisor with Intel VT-x and AMD AMD-V support.
Parallels Server (Beta) — Enterprise version of Parallels Workstation and Desktop for Mac. It will provide support for Intel’s second generation virtualization technology, called Virtualization Technology for Directed, or VT-d.

Padded Cell - virtual machine technology from Green Hills Software hosted on INTEGRITY real-time operating system. Supports Intel VT-x.
Real-Time Systems RTS Real-Time Hypervisor for x86
Sun xVM - xVM is based on Xen on x64
TRANGO real-time embedded hypervisor
VirtualBox supports both AMD-V and VT-x.[10]
Virtual Iron - Virtual Iron supports Intel VT-x and AMD-V.
VirtualLogix VLX supports Intel VT-x.
VMware Workstation — Workstation 5.5 supports Intel VT-x.[11]
VMware Fusion - Virtualization product for Mac OS X for use on Macintosh systems equipped with Intel Core, Core 2 Duo and Xeon processors.
VMware ESX Server - Enterprise Virtualization Server, needs hardware support when running x64 and x32 virtual machine simultaneously.
VMware Server - Supports Intel VT-x and AMD-V.
Xen — Xen 3.0.2 supports Intel VT-x and AMD-V.