Customers, Service Providers Tout Multi-Hypervisor, Migration Services for the Cloud

According to cloud analysts, there is a growing trend in the cloud industry to offer customers their choice of underlying virtual software. Whether it’s VMWare or Citrix’s XenServer, customers are becoming more aware of the need to migrate workloads between the cloud and their on-site environments, and are specifically looking for platforms that offer certain feature sets.

But most cloud infrastructure providers that host their cloud offerings currently architect their own data centers around a single hypervisor format. Tata Communications (News - Alert), the Indian telecommunications company that will start offering its Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in America in the coming months, thinks differently.

According to Tata’s Senior VP, John Landau, “Customers are multi-hypervisor, so we strive to support them.” The move toward offering platform-as-a-service is, however, expected to move providers to offer multiple hypervisors as well.

Customers however should not worry about the technological aspects of the cloud, according to a Cloud analyst at Structure Research, Philbert Shih. “Having common hypervisor software can be helpful since it reduces the need to rewrite applications to operate with specific hypervisors, for example,” he said. “But if the company will be running new applications in the cloud, then it shouldn’t really matter the hypervisor of the service provider.”

Zynga (News - Alert) is a typical example of how workload portability between the private and public clouds can be beneficial. Zynga is powered by a hybrid cloud and infrastructure called zCloud.  The company uses the public cloud service, Amazon Web Service (AWS), only when there is a spike in demand. Since zCloud has been architecture to look, feel and act like the AWS cloud, this makes for easy migration of workflows. The zCloud uses the same equipment as AWS, the Citrix Xen hypervisor to accomplish this.

With most companies experimenting with multiple hypervisor formats, usually within a test and development environments and within specific departments, companies like Terremark, CloudSwitch and 6Fusion offer cloud-delivered services that sit between the on-premise solution and the cloud solution to allow for migration.

With true interoperability, machines can be moved from VMWare to Xen in the background without noticing a difference. With cloud service providers not offering this capability, it is expected that more companies will start offering these cloud migration services.