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"VMware 'Miles Ahead' Of Microsoft Virtual Server"

Saturday, 30 September 2006 by Michel Roth

IT managers gathered in New York City earlier this week to get advice from experts on when, why and how to virtualize their server environments. The takeaway from the conference? If you want to run an enterprise-class virtualization platform in production today, stick with VMware.

"Between Microsoft Virtual Server and [VMware] ESX, there's no comparison," said Chris Wolf, an independent consultant and author of Virtualization: From the Desktop to the Enterprise. "Bells and whistles-wise, ESX is still miles ahead of Virtual Server," he said.

Over the course of his presentation, Wolf listed several areas where Microsoft has to work to bring Virtual Server up to snuff. For example, whereas VMware supports full access to the storage area network (SAN) within each virtual machine (VM), Microsoft Virtual Server guests access the SAN through a mount point or drive letter on the host operating system. Accessing the SAN this way adds latency, Wolf claims.

Wolf also called out the latency of the two platforms' virtual disk implementations � the .vmdk file for VMware, and .vhd for Microsoft Virtual Server. VMware published tests that showed ESX Server latency at 13% when running with virtual (rather than physical) disks. Tests performed by the Australian consulting firm Capitalhead benchmarked Microsoft Virtual Server virtual hard drive latency at 28%.

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