Apr 2011
The Big Four Hypervisors and Their Ecosystems

VMware dominates the enterprise market, no question – our 451 Market Monitor service estimates that almost 80% of virtual¬ized enterprise servers use VMware products. It is one of the great success stories of our time, but its products are not ideal for all use cases – virtualizing cloud and client workloads and bare-metal client virtualization, for example. The cloud is where we see support for alternative platforms – Xen especially, but also Hyper-V and KVM – begin¬ning to take hold. Others see alternative hypervisors popping up at the departmental level and are building out multi-hypervisor support. Given the likelihood that future enterprise infrastructure will include a large component of public and hybrid cloud resources, multi-hypervisor support makes sense.

This report provides an in-depth comparison of the major hypervisor offerings, and examines the rise of multi-hypervisor enterprise infrastructure. It includes a discussion of partner ecosystems and platform support, as well as implications for ISVs, enterprises and investors.

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