Here’s a must-read blog post from Andrew Kutz over on O’Reilly’s On Lamp: Ubiquitous underpinnings and idyllic interfaces – The virtualization ecosystem of the (very near) future.
An excerpt:
The virtualization ecosystem is changing; a division is occurring that is separating the ecosystem into two areas: specialized and commoditized software. Hypervisors are becoming commoditized such that they no longer need to be purchased from a specific vendor. A few years ago when virtualization was starting to heat up, playgrounds across the nation were quickly subject to the VMware-kids and Xen-kids cliques. Either you were down with ESX or you were hip to Xen; there was no middle-ground. However, today we find ourselves in an entirely different predicament. In addition to VMware and Citrix (bye, bye XenSource, we hardly knew ya), we have the soon-to-be released Hyper-V, VirtualIron, KVM, Sun xVM, and even Oracle is getting into the game. The number of available hypervisors on the market has grown drastically in a relatively short period of time. Compare that to when you had only two choices; now there is a plethora of virtualization solutions to answer the demand for reducing physical servers in the data center and consolidating resources. Now that hypervisors are a dime-a-dozen it only makes sense that a virtual machine (VM) should be able to run on any of them.
