VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, And Citrix XenServer: A Comparative Study

Introduction to Virtualization Host Software

VMware Inc. developed the ESXi server, which is a virtualisation software. It is the advanced and smaller version of the VMware ESX server. ESXi is also the footprint of it. The virtualisation software can be implemented in the VMware infrastructure to make centralized management of the desktops and the data centres of the enterprises easy. Direct console is the interface that the ESXi software requires. The interface functions for solving problems like troubleshooting and for configuring the systems in the initial stage. ESXi does not require the installation of an underlying operating system because it runs directly on hardware of the server. One of the features of virtualisation host software is that it creates and runs on its own kernel. ESXi being a virtualisation software possess the same feature. After the Linux kernel bootstraps the ESXi kernel performs its task. The distinct features and benefits of ESXi are listed below:

• The security system of ESXi is significantly simple.
• It does not make use of the server console. Instead, it uses the direct console interface that eliminates the need to install and manage the third-party agents.
• It allows fast storage access by virtual machines. Network access is also made easy by using these machines.
• ESXi has several benefits like, it can efficiently manage memory for example memory ballooning and swapping, built on a reliable foundation than the other hypervisors and is comparatively cheap.

VMware can be successfully applied to most of the industry sectors like education where it will provide access and control to remote students with the help of virtual desktops, in the manufacturing industry by global collaboration thereby, increasing the productivity, in the healthcare industry by securing patients information in the data centres and so on.

A hypervisor that creates virtual machines. Microsoft Hyper-V was previously known as Windows Server Virtualization and is codenamed as Viridian. It has an additional feature of the Windows Server Core user interface. However, other roles of the server are not available. It has direct access to the hardware of the server, which means that it is a native server. PC’s with 64-bit hardware capacity will only be able to use this software. It saves all the virtual machines to a file with .VHD extension name. The distinct features and benefits of the Microsoft Hyper-V are listed below:

• It is a standalone server and requires a 64-bit hardware for its installation.
• It does not support RAM Over-commitment.
• Has unlimited number of virtual switches.
• It has dynamic memory management feature.
• The benefits of this hypervisor are easy back-up feature, cheaper than VMware, easy maintenance and simple live migrations.

The industry sector where Hyper-V is most suitable is education. The software will enable others to connect to students remotely through virtual machines. It can also find application in the telecommunications sector as the software is cheaper than the VMware. Therefore, the telecommunications industry will efficiently reduce cost and increase the quality of service.

XenServer is another hypervisor that was developed by Citrix. All the virtualisation host software performs in a similar way. However, there are minor differences. XenServer is a complete virtualization host software stage that targets large enterprises that is built in to effortlessly handle various workload categories. It is also independent of the underlying operating systems. Therefore, the software is known as bare metal virtualisation software. It provides all the features in a single interface. As the virtual machines are free to move from one host to another with no downtimes therefore,  it eliminates the need for planned downtime. The virtual machines in the XenServer can be automatically restarted if failure occurs. The datacentres consume less electricity. The features and benefits of Citrix XenServer are:

• It does not have any virtual CPU’s in the host.
• It can accommodate up to 75 virtual machines per host. The total capacity of Ram and virtual disk per machine are 1024GB and 512 respectively.
• It supports a number of host operating systems however, Solaris x86 platform and MS DOS are not supported as neither the host nor the guest operating systems.
• The benefits of the software are reduce cost due to decrease in the space requirements of the data centres, provides all the features needed to manage data centres.

Comparative Study of VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer

It finds application in the retail industry by enhancing customer experience and convert them from shoppers to buyers. The sales executives and associates are completely informed about the products their customers demand for. The software is significantly useful in the government sector as they can respond faster to the needs of the agencies and reducing IT costs and operating expenses.

1. While implementing a new platform security issues should be kept in mind. The data stored in the data centres should be well maintained and secured so that it can be retrieved as per the requirement.
2. The purpose of virtual machines is to provide a replica of the underlying physical system. Therefore, it should be made more user friendly. XenServer provides the feature of personal use of the virtual machine. Therefore, it should be seen that the user does not face any issues while using it.

• ESXi is part of the VMware vSphere that has several advanced options for management and administration, like vMotion (live migration), easy to handle, high capability to tolerate faults, Storage Motion. Third-party vendors have been successful in developing several useful tools that made the infrastructure of ESXi powerful. However, it is much costlier, compared to alternative server virtualization platforms. It is worth investing on the VMware ESXi as the statistics show that seventy-six percentage of organizations opt for VMware hypervisor. It is targeted largely at the big enterprises.
• ESXi is one of the most popular platforms that have are supported professionally and are repeatedly being updated by recent features. It provides a number of enterprises features that the other servers like the XenServer does not provides.
• ESXi also provides a wonderful feature of huge scalability and is independent of the           underlying operating system, which means that it runs in bare metal. Hardware purchase and up gradation of the software is not required as ESXi can be separated into a number of virtual machines.
• It keeps account of all the entries so that it is made more user friendly and easily accessible to the users.
• It is the leader in the server virtualisation market with additional feature of providing management and backup applications.
• Remote connection is facilitated between ESXi and Windows PC.
• Service interruption is eliminated while transferring VM file from one place to another.

                                     

                                        Figure 1. State of Infrastructure before and after using the VMware ESXi.

                                                                        (Source: Bezbaruah et al., 2018.)

The case study deals with the data protection issue in an educational institution. The institution was looking for a reliable solution to backup critical data. Therefore, the challenges of the software was to provide strong security to the databases, to make the usage and the management of the data easy, solution cost was a big issue, application awareness, storage efficiency and single vendor backup solution. The results of the use of VMware ESXi was that the implementation of the data centres became cost effective, the usage also became easy, memory management became dynamic increased storage efficiency and high level of data integration.

The price depends on the version of ESXi that is being used.

ESXi Version	Price	Number of processors that are required	Cost of ESXi for providing basic support	Cost of ESXi for Production Support
Standard version that requires vCenter	$996	1	$272	$326
Enterprise Plus that requires vCenter	$3,497	1	$732	$871
Enterprise Plus in addition with Operations Management (requires vCenter)	$4,394	1	$922	$1,100
Foundation vCenter	$1,492	N/A	$544	$646
Standard vCenter	$4,999	N/A	$1050	$1250
Kits that are Essential	$500	3 servers per 2 processors each	$65	$300 per incident
Essentials Plus Kit	$4,496	3 servers per 2 processors each	$945	$1125
Acceleration Kit- Standard version	$10,994	6	$2,513	$3,000
Enterprise Plus  in addition with the Acceleration Kit	$22,999	6	$5,662	$6,742
Enterprise Plus in addition with Operations Management along with Acceleration Kit	$24,996	6	$6,800	$8,095

                                     

                                     

References:

Babu, A., Hareesh, M.J., Martin, J.P., Cherian, S. and Sastri, Y., 2014, August. System performance evaluation of para virtualization, container virtualization, and full virtualization using xen, openvz, and xenserver. In Advances in Computing and Communications (ICACC), 2014 Fourth International Conference on (pp. 247-250). IEEE.

Bezbaruah, A., Reuther, L., Brown, T.O.N. and Starks, J.A., Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC, 2018. Efficiently providing virtual machine reference points. U.S. Patent 9,875,160.

Desai, A., Oza, R., Sharma, P. and Patel, B., 2013. Hypervisor: A survey on concepts and taxonomy. International Journal of Innovative Technology and Exploring Engineering, 2(3), pp.222-225.

Fayyad-Kazan, H., Perneel, L. and Timmerman, M., 2013. Benchmarking the performance of Microsoft Hyper-V server, VMware ESXi and Xen hypervisors. Journal of Emerging Trends in Computing and Information Sciences, 4(12), pp.922-933.

Guthrie, F., Lowe, S. and Coleman, K., 2013. VMware vSphere design. John Wiley & Sons.

Hu, W., Hicks, A., Zhang, L., Dow, E.M., Soni, V., Jiang, H., Bull, R. and Matthews, J.N., 2013, August. A quantitative study of virtual machine live migration. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM Cloud and Autonomic Computing Conference (p. 11). ACM.

Hwang, J., Zeng, S., Wu, F. and Wood, T., 2013, May. A component-based performance comparison of four hypervisors. In IM (pp. 269-276).

Nomnga, P., Scott, M.S. and Nyambi, P.B., 2014. A Technical Cost Effective Network-Domain Hosting through Virtualization: a VMware ESXi and vSphere Client Approach. International

Journal of Computer Applications, 91(10), pp.39-47.

Reddy, P.V.V. and Rajamani, L., 2014, August. Performance evaluation of Operating Systems in the private cloud with XenServer hypervisor using SIGAR Framework. In Computer Science & Education (ICCSE), 2014 9th International Conference on (pp. 183-188). IEEE.

Tharayanil, M.B., Whitney, G., Aiash, M. and Benzaid, C., 2015, August. Virtualization and cyber security: arming future security practitioners. In Trustcom/BigDataSE/ISPA, 2015 IEEE (Vol. 1, pp. 1398-1402). IEEE.

Yalcin, N., Altun, Y. and Kose, U., 2015. Educational material development model for teaching computer network and system management. Computer Applications in Engineering Education, 23(4), pp.621-629.