The Hypervisor Shell Game

Summarized from Wikipedia:

The game requires three shells and a small, soft round ball, about the size of a pea. The shell man begins the game by placing the pea under one of the shells, then quickly shuffles the shells around. Once done shuffling, the operator takes bets from his audience on the location of the pea. The audience is told that if a player bets and guesses correctly, the player will win back double his bet (that is, he will double his money); otherwise they lose the money. However, in the hands of a skilled operator, it is not possible for the game to be won, unless the operator wants the player to win.

Much has been made of recent announcements about "free" virtualization.  Sun has distributed over 5 million copies of our open source xVM VirtualBox hypervisor.  Other major vendors have recently announced "free" offerings, or products with prices quoted at less than $30.  I've seen a lot of discussion about this over the past several days, and it's become clear how confused people are becoming about the costs involved in Virtualization.  While the core hypervisor may be free, or relatively low cost, there are usually many other costs a customer needs to examine.  What tools will be used to manage the hypervisor?  How much do they cost?  Under what license terms is the solution distributed?  Is it a standard open source license, or custom commercial license that may give the customer fewer rights in terms of how they may use the product?  Is another product required to be purchased at the same time as the free/low-cost product (for example: must I purchase a high-cost OS license bundled with the low-cost hypervisor?).  What are the associated support costs?

It's clear that many small-scale users will benefit from the fact that basic virtualization technology is now becoming available much more ubiquitously.  However, customers planning large scale deployments will need to carefully evaluate the full costs of a deployment.  The calculations won't be trivial, and you'll probably need to dig into each vendor's pricing plan to see the full scope of the cost.

It sure is an exciting time to be in the Virtualization business. The world is changing fast, but some parts of business game never change.

If you'd like to download a completely open source hypervisor option (available under a GPL v2 license) you should go check out xVM VirtualBox.

Posted at 08:19AM Jul 24, 2008 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization  |