PhD Virtual has gained its second round of funding with investment from Citrix amongst others as discussed within our post News: esXpress is no more but what does this mean for XenServer? Up until this point it looked like Citrix was out of the server hypervisor wars and backing Microsoft’s Hyper-V play. Yet this looks on the surface like a basic shift to that direction. Yes, XenServer was placed into the OpenSource community and the latest improvements, such as the Open VSwitch integration and a new releases emphatically say that XenServer is alive and well and that its ecosystem is growing for that matter so is Hyper-V’s.
There are now many more products on the market that not only cater to VMware but Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer, Xen, and with that KVM. Some of these tools are well known in the virtualization community while others are not. This is a list of tools that have specific code and integrations for each of the listed hypervisors, not ones that naturally work with all hypervisors such as many APM and other Performance Management solutions, that is a different type of list.
| Product | VMware vSphere | Microsoft Hyper-V | Citrix XenServer |
| Akorri BalancePoint | X | X | |
| Catbird Security | X | X | |
| Reflex Systems | X | X | X |
| PhD Virtual | X1 | X | |
| Veeam | X | X | |
| VizionCore | X | X | |
| Tripwire | X | X | |
| Microsoft | X2 | X | |
| Zenoss | X | X | X |
| vKernel | X | X | |
| eG Innovations | X | X | |
| Liquidware Labs | X | X |
1 ESXi Support Planned for near future. 2 PowerShell and SCVVM Products.
This list will grow over time as companies realize that some of the largest clouds ala Amazon are based on Xen and that the SMB space is where the real competition for new seats is taking place. Hyper-V is selling well into the SMB space as it is readily available with a Microsoft Windows 2008 upgrade.
In addition, there are a few companies targeting the SMB and Hyper-V only space such as VM6 and Virsto. What is interesting about these companies is that they have actually started their development for VMware products but switched to Microsoft for their final products.
VMware is no longer the end all for virtualization, as they concentrate on the high end, Microsoft and Citrix are eating away within the SMB space, the growth of their ecosystems shows this as well. I expect these ecosystems to continue to grow and become more robust. The writing is on the wall. Even Enterprise class products are seriously looking at Hyper-V and Citrix.
Hi –
Thanks for the mention!
Just a clarifying comment for you. We started our initial development
and prototyping on the Xen platform. When we received our initial
funding is when we made our strategic investment into Hyper-V. We
still are looking forward to our port to VMware, but we are not there, yet.
Best, Mindy.