The debate lives on and in the past 7-8 years, we’ve seen a hypervisor falling in popularity, come back to be the most deployed in the world and one that was just a small project, balloon into the fastest growing on the market.
In a recent trip I made to Singapore, my colleague and I were discussing NFV (Network Function Virtualization) and in that meeting, I brought up the question “Why KVM”? “Why not XEN?”. This was in response to a comment that was made about his mantra that he was adamant on sticking with open-sourced technologies.
To the client, KVM was the only way to go, which prompted the question and the answer was as simple as could be.
To paraphrase, he said, the course of the roadmap for XEN is such that technologies and functionality are influenced by only a few, such as Amazon, Alyiun (Alibaba), Netflix, Tencent, especially those companies that heavily depend on Xen virtualization for their business model.
In contrast, KVM tends to move towards larger, more diversified user-based solutions where users have more influence on the direction instead of a more corporate roadmap approach. You could say that it is less focused on the business model and more focused on individual use cases.
After quite a bit of research, and personal experience from speaking with customers previously, I do feel comfortable saying that KVM is now the hypervisor of choice when customers come to us.
I’ve also seen that a number of people that I have spoken to (over 100) has made the switch and or in the process of doing it from technologies like HyperV, VMware and even XEN.
Lastly, just because KVM’s popularity is rising quickly, does not equate to blind adoption and moreso based on who’s involved.
References: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blog/ibmvirtualization/entry/kvm_goes_to_work?lang=en http://blog.scottlowe.org/2013/05/30/a-use- case-for- policy-routing- with-kvm-and-open- vswitch/ https://www.linux.com/news/kvm-matures- and-use- cases-multiply http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/feature/Xen-vs- KVM-Linux-virtualization-hypervisors http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tutorial/Quiz-KVM- hypervisor-and- virtual-infrastructure-management?q0=1&q1=1&q2=3&q3=1&q4=1&q5=1&q6=1&q7=1&x=48&y=8 http://blog.scalecomputing.com/kvm-or- vmware-why- kvm-is- right-for- the-times-part- 1-of- 2/ https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/376890-xen- and-kvm- who-is- using-what-and- why https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/766785-is- time-to- reconsider-kvm-as-a- production-ready- hypervisor https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/67007/xen-vs- kvm http://www.computerweekly.com/tutorial/Xen-virtualization- vs-KVM- An- evaluation https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/OVM_KVM_wp_Final7.pdf http://toutvirtual.com/blogs/2009/03/19/the-rise- and-fall- of-kvm/comment-page-1/ http://www.enterprisestorageguide.com/thoughts-rise- kvm-hyperconverged-infrastructure-solutions http://www.stratus.com/stratus-blog/2014/01/07/whitepaper- kvm- virtualization-for- enterprise-environments/ http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-dumps- vmware-esxi- for-kvm-2015-10