VMware has long been a leader in Virtualization market. In an ever growing Virtualization market, the three main players have been VMWare, Microsoft (Hyper-v) and Citrix. There are a lot of other vendors for Virtualization solutions such as IBM, RedHat, HP and Intel. VMware has got most of the market share with 59% followed closely behind with Microsoft with 53% and Citrix with doubled market share of 18% from 9% (Source: Marketwire.com).

Among all three of the top virtualization vendors, Citrix has the lowest price point. Microsoft has offered its virtualization hyper visor free and included with its Windows 2008 R2 Server operating System, however even with the free offering, Microsoft charges quite a bit for its enterprise grade virtualization products for monitoring and maintaining your virtual infrastructure.

Having lost out on the battle to gain any significant market share in the virtual market, big companies such as RedHat, IBM and HP have all teamed up together to provide a robust, scalable and solid virtualization through Open Virtualization Alliance. According to Open Virtualization Alliance provides KVM (Kernel-based virtual machine) infrastructure which they claim is very solid, can scale up to 4096 core hosts with 64 TeraBytes of RAM. You can read more about Kernel Bases Virtual Machine here.

Open Virtualization Alliance is growing every day with about 200 partner members, with recent additions from SUSE, BMC and Eucalyptus Systems. The first and foremost criteria to join the Open Virtualization Alliance is a commitment to support KVM as an Open Source alternative for Virualization. In all, Open Virtualization Allaince is helping promote the KVM technology against VMWare to make virtualization affordable at a resonable of free price point and at the same time ensure its inter operatibilty and compatibilty with other major virtualization solutions.

Share your ideas with us, what virtualization technology does your corporation use and why do you favor that ?