In a recent article written by the register , Redhat claimed that its recently acquired KVM can run 5 vms for every 3 that ESX can run when compared on the same hardware. When compared with Citrix Xenserver, citrix performs even worse. The claim was made in London this week at a journalists’ roundtable by Benny Schnaider, the CEO of qumranet. He claimed that KVM can run 52 VMs in a physical server, in which ESX can run a maximum of 35 vms on the same server.
 

The reason he listed for this is basically that the hardware assisted virtualization strategy that kvm uses outperforms hypervisors that need to support older chips without any hardware virtualization extensions. This does not come as a surprise to me and the gap will only widen as the chip makers continue to add more virtualization features. This goes back again to the previous article posted here on why kvm will eventually be a dominant hypervisor in the market. Benny goes on to say that KVM is also more efficient when it comes to virtualizing windows and dealing with it’s heavy memory requirements.

The original article can be found at the following link: Redhat sprints past ESX on VM running.