Comments on: Managing the hypervisor battle

By: Eric Gray

Eric Gray — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 05:03:38 +0000

Joep, nice article. It would be great to see more coverage of virtualization management. Not as “cool” as the hypervisor, but each needs the other.

By: Niels Ballis

Niels Ballis — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:25:26 +0000

You keep talking about extra cost, but in any half decent Hyper-V environment you’ll need SCVMM, so i don’t see how using this tool in a mixed environment would cost you extra.
Same goes for environments with Xenserver where you’ll need to have Citrix Essentials.

By: j.piscaer

j.piscaer — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:34:53 +0000

Well, obviously, the single pane of glass thing is a great idea, to minimize management overhead. I would applaud any management tool that fully manages multiple hypervisors.

At this point in time, however, none of the management tools offered today are capable of managing multiple hypervisors in any good sense, so I do not see why anyone would pay extra for management software to actually lose some of the features of the individual hypervisors.

By: Niels Ballis

Niels Ballis — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:07:12 +0000

Hi Joep, i’m not saying IT departments should buy SCVMM to manage their vCenter/ESX environments. But in a mixed environment Hyper-V and ESX i personally see the advantages of consolidating management to one tool even if it may cost some features.

By: j.piscaer

j.piscaer — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:59:01 +0000

Hi Niels, thanks for your reaction. At this point, the sad thruth is that using SCVMM for managing vCenter/ESX will not only cost you extra (having two management tools instead of one), but will make your environment more complex: some tasks can be done in SCVMM, others have to be done directly in vCenter. How is something more expensive and not feature-complete beter?

I’ve been playing with Citrix XenServer Essentials, and plan to write about it next week.

By: Niels Ballis

Niels Ballis — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:38:26 +0000

Great post Joep, I just don’t completely share your opinion. First of all I expect to see more and more mixed hypervisor environments, because different hypervisors have different advantages and disadvantages.
Now I do agree that the multi-hypervisor tools are not at the point where they should be, but these tools are only the first step in this direction and will become better and more feature rich. Now even if some features aren’t available in these tools they enhance the managebility of your environment. So per environment there should be an assesment if the missing features are essential and if not i can see administrators choosing the multi-hypervisor managementtool.

I’m also wondering if you have had time to investigate Citrix Essentials for managing Xenserver and Hyper-V