2012 Prediction: Virsto Software
Multi-Hypervisor Becomes the Industry Standard
Over the next year the common industry practice of standardizing on one hypervisor platform in an IT organization will give way to widespread adoption of a multi-hypervisor strategy. As a result of pricing pressures, platform maturity, and a desire to avoid vendor lock-in, IT organizations will aggressively pursue a multi-hypervisor strategy. There’s no doubt that competition drives prices down, and customers will no doubt pursue this time-proven strategy in enterprise purchasing as soon as it becomes feasible.
Hypervisor vendors are already providing multi-platform management tools, making this an emerging frontier in the ongoing server virtualization battle. As hypervisor functionality differences between platforms narrow over time, the management tools are expected by vendors to provide competitive differentiation. It is likely, however, that the different hypervisor platforms will retain some competitive differentiation for certain types of use cases. This will likely drive customers to select and leverage the platforms best suited to a particular area. While multiple hypervisor platforms may exist in test environments throughout a company, it really only takes two to drive the competition from which enterprise purchasing departments will benefit. It is reasonable to expect enterprises over time to move to this two platform strategy.
But even with a good set of multi-platform management tools, moving between hypervisors can be a daunting task. Assuming that different hypervisors can meet the same set of functional requirements, the data formats in use by each hypervisor vendor represent a form of lock-in that discourages migration to a new platform. To minimize migration costs, enterprises could carefully manage the two environments up front so as to minimize the amount of data that would ever need to be migrated between platforms. Alternatively, the emergence of a common data format across hypervisor platforms would significantly lower the barriers to migration. As storage hypervisors begin to emerge in the market, it’s clear that this would be a good strategic location to provide this common data format across hypervisor platforms. And there’s no doubt that customers would look favorably upon a common data format across hypervisors.
