I'm not aware of many competitors in their market space - Hyper-V certainly, but that's less of an option for some. Short of rearchitecting our service as a series of containers, what action can conscientious corporate leaders take?
Openstack is trying to solve this problem; but so far, openstack seems to be more of marketing, less of success stories.
These are all part of oVirt/RHEV.
Our company started with RHEV and ran into lots and lots of issues with it. There were compatibility issues between our VM infrastructure and SAN (firmware problems on one side, I forget which). Guests would just lock up all the time. There were other problems, but I'm not familiar with them.
We've had little to no problem since migrating to VMWare.
however qemu-kvm hasn't been around so long, it's still not anywhere near the adoption numbers such as Xen, however I've used it in production in three different large companies with great success.. the beauty is that more people who use it means more eyes on fixing it.
so for small things especially I'd really recommend it, and honestly I like it anyway, it feels very freeing to use libvirt/kvm- you have much finer grained controls than what vmware gives even in it's expensive offerings, and the best bit is that it's free as in beer- you can use all it's features without being in any kind of violation with licenses. the tools to administer it are ssh if you're familiar with unix or a GUI python program which gives you good control and graphs (works over ssh tooo, so encryption goodness) and works cross platform (last time I checked) contrasting to when I last used vmware:- you had to use there vsphere client which isn't ported to OSX or Linux.
I use Windows at work so it's not a problem, but I would prefer to run linux so I can actually use decent virtualisation solutions for small test labs, my company baulks at the cost of vmware workstation, and if I run linux for kvm then I cannot administer our massive ESX clusters..
I think datacenter platforms will start to look more like "Cloud Hosting" and less like it currently does where we basically just slice up a server into many different servers.
https://www.joyent.com/private-cloud https://github.com/joyent/sdc
If you prefer a more hands on approach just plain Xen or KVM is a great option too. As for orchestration in that space have a look at running Openstack or Xen Orchestra etc.
If your goal is VM orchestration, and you are not ready to go full self-service via OpenStack and similar, then we also provide a product called CloudForms (http://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/cloudf...).
Basic idea is that it allows you to manage your hypervisors/VMs, regardless of what you are using (VMware, RHEV, EC2, etc). By manage, I mean that you can provision and implement policies around anything that might be done to a VM. For example, it can require a manager approve an VMs deployed into the production data center.
It takes a lot of configuration, but fills a gap between IT provisions all VMs and full self service.
Granted my needs are hardly enterprise scale, but may be worth you taking a look (if you haven't already)
I'm seeing much better direct device I/O on KVM than on ESXi (which is saying a lot actually, since raw I/O is a bit tricky on the latter).
Grab the oVirt upstream and decide which of the commercially-supported downstreams you want.
https://www.suse.com/documentation/suse-cloud-5/
Additionally it supports some components from vmWare: https://www.suse.com/documentation/suse-cloud-5/book_cloud_d...
Disclaimer: I work at SUSE.
I always cringe when people believe VMware HA == HA solution. No. It's part of a HA strategy, but 30 seconds to declare a node is dead, and then however long booting up a big server full of VM's takes - if your storage is not that great, that can be quite a while (boot storms are fun).
If up to 15 mins of complete downtime counts as HA for you, great! But that's already risking 99.99% SLA.
But then, you could use Xen directly.
XenServer is also 100% open sourced now by Citrix. It's a completely free product with all the features, but you can pay Citrix for enterprise support if you want/need it.