KVM: Real threat to VMware/Xen, says Industry insider

Ok so all those whisperings were getting ouder and louder in my head and I had to just let it out. The video is by Greg Hartman and my industry insider friend, who wishes anonymity, had some pointers:



Featured opinion from an industry insider/researcher (This individual has no affiliation to VMware, Citrix , Microsoft or whoever):

o The rate-of-change has gone up significantly, and
fairly uniformly across all parts of the kernel
(core, arch-specific, device drivers, networking, etc).
It's greater than any other software project on Earth.
It's also broaden out (flattened), with lots of changes
coming from a broader set of people.

o KVM will win out over the Xen/VMware models. KVM uses Linux
as the hypervisor, whereas Xen needs to recreate its
own NUMA model, scheduling, memory management,
power management, and needs to use Linux for drivers.
KVM gets all these things for free from Linux (Qumranet's
opinion also). Combined with the rate of change and
massive amount of contributions to Linux, he thinks
Xen can not keep up. Also, newer real-time features
in Linux give real-time scheduling between VMs. AFAIK,
VMware doesn't have anything in the area of real-time
VMs scheduling.

o The Enterprise Linux model is broken. Stale out-of-date
Linux kernels are untenable to maintain, because new hardware
support in new kernels often drives architectural changes,
which are really difficult to back-port. He thinks Enterprise
Linux should also use newer kernels.

Feel free to comment on it.