Vijay Sarathy's Blog Veritable Vijay

Theres a lot of talk these days about how the Hypervisor is becoming a commodity. I disagree with this notion. A commodity is defined as something that has lost its differentiation across suppliers offerings. One look at this chart shows that there are numerous differentiated hypervisor offerings out there today for a variety of platforms. This doesn't look like a commodity to me.

I do understand that the sentiment about commoditization has arisen mostly in the context of the x86/x64 space where the entrenched player suddenly faces competition notably from numerous Xen-based open source offerings including Sun xVM Server. Even so it is incorrect to say that this market segment is headed towards commoditization. Perhaps the potential for common standards and interoperability (e.g. OVF, Xen etc) is being confused with commoditization. In my mind the situation is somewhat analagous to the automobile industry. Just because we have so many car manufacturers with similar offerings you can't say that the car is a commodity. Sure the car has evolved around some standards e.g. the brake is always to the left of the accelerator and every car typically has a dashboard with a speedometer. Nevertheless, numerous vendors still thrive by offering cars with differentiations that appeal to a wide range of customer needs e.g. the need for basic transportation, the need for speed, the need for safety, the need for transporting entire families comfortably etc.

As market for virtualization evolves and moves beyond today's predominantly SMB oriented test/development and server consolidation deployments, enterprise datacenter managers will look for solutions that address their specific scalability, availability, manageability and security requirements. In this context, I envision that there will be more than one virtualization platform to choose from with differentiation built-in at the Hypervisor level. For example the Sun xVM Server is a hypervisor that will leverage the opensource Xen platform for x86/x64 and incorporate many enterprise-grade features e.g Predictive Self-Healing, Network Bandwidth Management and Security, to offer a truly differentiated hypervisor offering for the enterprise.

In summary, I think the Hypervisor is far from being a commodity play. Then again if you somehow think any less of being in a commodity business, I suggest you take a look at the energy market outlook this year :-)