Why you should embrace memory overcommits for your VMs [Video]

Although available only in the costlier VMware ESX, this technology should be considered essential by IT

Credit: Nongnuch_L / Shutterstock

The independent analyst firm Burton Group recently released a proposed set of standards for server virtualization — some required, some preferred, some optional — to help IT see beyond the data sheet marketing check boxes for EMC VMware’s ESX, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, and Citrix’s XenServer. VMware supports 27 of the requirements and most of the preferred and optional standards, while Hyper-V supports 24 of the required standards and fewer of the others (my previous post “A new wrinkle — and possible conclusion — for the hypervisor wars” discusses who would be affected by those three “required” omissions in Hyper-V).

Note: Actually, according to Chris Wolf (Citrix CTP, MVP for Microsoft Virtualization, vExpert for VMWare), the author of the Burton Group criteria, Hyper-V meets 25 of the 27 requirements because he was able to …