The most used hypervisor? Xen

STOP! Stop stop stop. I understand your outrage. I know that you are ready to shout that I am an incompetent idiot if I wrote this in the title. The title is really provocative, but let's see.

So. What did you want to tell me? Most of you probably wanted to let me know that VMware is the dominant virtualization system for enterprises. Perhaps someone who is connected with companies whose entire infrastructure is built on Microsoft solutions is ready to convince me that Hyper-V’s popularity is comparable, or even surpasses VMware in some cases. And there will definitely be those who remember that telecom, hosting and OpenStack solutions, as a rule, use KVM.

In other words, it all depends on how you count. If the share of the corporate market (profits), then the leader will be VMware. If by ... let's call it “ecosystem reach,” then Hyper-V, if by usage growth rate, then KVM. But I want to compare the number of virtual machines running on hypervisors. On a global scale, of course.

How to estimate the number of virtual machines worldwide and the IT infrastructure in which they operate? We will assume that the largest number of virtual machines from cloud service providers and turn to the results of market research (2015) of cloud services from the Synergy Research Group:

Amazon remained the largest cloud provider, recording a market share of 31% as an asset. Following behind, Microsoft and IBM lag far behind the leader, with 9 percent and 7 percent, respectively. The top five in 2015 also included Google (4%) and Salesforce (4%).

')


Please note, the Amazon cloud business is more than the total from Microsoft, IBM, Google and Salesforce.com (!!!) . According to Gartner 2014, Amazon sold 5 times more computing power than the other 14 companies in the quadrant combined. Moreover, Amazon continues to strengthen its position by increasing its market share, the total volume of which in 2014 amounted to more than $ 17 billion.

Go ahead. What hypervisors are used by leading cloud providers? Look at the picture ( here it is from this post ):


Of the 15 cloud vendors represented on the graph, 4 use Xen, but we are primarily interested in Amazon.

Important note: In fact, Amazon does not use any specific product like Citrix XenServer or something else, but “its Xen”, created on the basis of the code developed by the xenproject.org community.

Of course, the data is not entirely fresh, and many cloud providers use several hypervisors at once in their IT infrastructure, and not all of them are taken into account. For example, besides Amazon Web Service, major Xen-based virtualization “users” are Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, Liquid Web, Verizon Cloud, Linode, SparkNode, OrionVM, and Rackspace Cloud. But in this case, do not need exact numbers. Even by rough estimates, it can be seen that the share of using the Xen hypervisor in cloud computing is ~ 50% (mainly due to AWS); the remaining half of the market is shared by KVM, Hyper-V and VMware.

The Xen developers are very proud of this and call their project “Open hypervisor created for cloud computing”:



I'll write a little more about the market share of AWS and revenue figures. For a moment, I want to return to one of my previous posts, “ Why Citrix did not become a“ new Red Hat ”, I will quote:

Becoming “the next Red Hat” is a great goal, but when you look at modern IT trends, it may be worth thinking about becoming the next Amazon.

Indeed, Red Hat helped Amazon create infrastructure for AWS at one time, and now AWS revenues amount to $ 7.88 billion (by the end of 2015), while Red Hat earned only $ 2 billion.

According to the results of the last quarterly report of Amazon (Q2 2016, which ended on June 30), AWS revenue amounted to 2.9 billion dollars, which is 58% more than the same period last year. Accordingly, it can be expected that AWS revenue for the year will be more than $ 10 billion. At the same time, $ 2.9 billion is only 9.5% of Amazon's total revenue in the second quarter. 2016, which amounted to $ 30.4 billion, (nevertheless, it is a profitable segment, which brought the company a net profit of $ 718 million) Looking at these figures, it is not surprising that the head of Amazon, Jeff Bezos ) takes the second (!!!) place in the Forbes ranking of the richest IT businessmen (with a personal fortune of $ 66 billion)

And now, after we looked at the numbers, let's answer the question in the heading: What is the most used hypervisor (for cloud computing)?