Key Factors in Choosing Your Next Hypervisor
Updated: Nov 6, 2024
By: Nisarg Shah, Enterprise Solutions Architect at Nth Generation
Over the course of my 16-year career, I've had the opportunity to deploy a variety of hypervisors, including VMware, Nutanix AHV, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer. One consistent observation is the mixed reactions to the recent changes in VMware’s offerings. While some organizations have embraced and renewed their VMware contracts, others have seen this as a chance to explore and adopt alternative hypervisors.
For those organizations considering a new hypervisor, it's important to recognize that many new players are emerging in this space, each vying for a share of the market. When evaluating a new hypervisor, I focus on several key factors:
Simplicity: A hypervisor should not only simplify the creation of virtual environments but also incorporate intelligent automation to streamline operations and provide out-of-the-box analytics. Features like one-click upgrades for entire stacks greatly enhance operational efficiency and user satisfaction.
Support for Containers and Microservices: In today’s software-defined world, including storage and networks, it’s crucial that the hypervisor supports containerization technologies such as Kubernetes and OpenShift. This capability ensures easier integration across various cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure, creating a single Control Plane across all your sites and workloads. With rapid adoption of AI, containerization again becomes the key as the Nvidia Software Platform and upcoming AI technologies and models are built on cloud-native software architecture.
Compatibility: Ensure the new hypervisor is compatible with all your existing infrastructure and components. VMware’s extensive partnerships and integrations are a testament to the importance of this factor. We want to avoid the complexities that arise when, for example, running Windows applications on a Mac.
Additional Features/Services: Beyond traditional infrastructure virtualization, assess what additional services the hypervisor offers. Look for built-in disaster recovery (DR) capabilities, native connectivity to replicate across other physical clusters or public clouds, support for network segmentation, and integration with container technologies. Consider also if it provides data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) future proofing.
Cost Governance: save public cloud cost by defining optimization policies. Cost savings can be achieved by system generated recommendations like stopping unused resources, right size instances and services. Setting up automated playbooks for cloud operations.
By focusing on these criteria, you can better determine which hypervisor will best meet your organization’s needs and future-proof your virtual environment.
Request more information here: https://www.nth.com/nth-survey
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