With Citrix escalating its fight against VMware, and VMware expanding its arsenal, it’s worth taking a look at the current state of the virtualization market. Gartner has published its Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure report.
The MQ puts all the major players in one of of two quadrants: leaders or niche players. The other quadrants are completely empty.
Update: Gartner has requested that we remove the direct link to the report, and the image of the Magic Quadrant. If you still want to look, Microsoft has made it available on Technet.
The leaders are, unsurprisingly, Citrix, Microsoft and VMware. VMware leads, in terms of both completeness of vision and ability to execute. But Gartner notes that Citrix and Microsoft have more market share now than the two had a year ago.
The niche players Gartner considered are Oracle, Parallels and Red Hat.
Gartner only looked at companies that had virtualization technologies for x86 servers via hypervisors or container technology. The required capabilities were:
- Administrative management frameworks/suites for hypervisors/containers
- Embedded virtualization management technology (e.g., live migration)
When assessing the offerings from each company, Gartner did not consider high-level management functions such as “operational automation tools that deal with virtual resources, application performance tools that leverage and monitor virtualization, disaster recovery tools that leverage virtualization, desktop provisioning and brokering software, etc.”
Gartner only considered companies that had 100 different customers as of April 1, 2011. The report only looked at commercial vendor-based offerings and did not include Xen and KVM.
