ESX vs. Hyper-V: Under the Hood
Greg Shields, formerly a columnist with
Redmond magazine as well as
Virtualization Review, has one of the very best explanations I've ever seen on the architectural differences between Hyper-V and ESX in his
blog over at Realtime Publishers.
It's a balanced explanation, not taking sides, of the reasons Hyper-V is faster than ESX, as we found in our recent hypervisor comparison. In Greg's analysis, it mainly comes down to a question of drivers, and how they interact with the hypervisor layer.
So Greg, a challenge to you: now that you've done it for Hyper-V, how about a followup with XenServer and ESX? I know that Hyper-V are architecturally similar (although Hyper-V was not developed in conjunction with Citrix, despite popular mythology), but in our testing, XenServer beat both hypervisors in terms of raw performance. What makes it fastest?
In any event, Greg's article, like all his pieces, is worth a read.
Posted by Keith Ward on 04/15/2009 at 12:48 PM