The Canonical List of Hypervisors That Suck

A recent, uh, discussion on Twitter reminded me that, just like operating systems, all hypervisors suck in some way. Or, at the very least, people complain about each one, and how they cost money, or that they’re free, or that they require support contracts, they don’t require support, they have no support, their support has no clue, they’re fragmented, they have no ecosystem, all they have is an ecosystem, who needs an ecosystem except idiots who can’t code and if you were worth anything you’d shut it and write your own long-distance replication tool instead of complaining about it, they don’t have a community, they do have a community but it’s too small, they do have a community but it’s filled with jerks and n00bs, they run on Windows, they run on Linux, they run on AIX, they run on Solaris, they run on z/OS, they run on Mac OS X, they look like Linux but aren’t, their networking is brain dead, their networking is superior, their networking will be superior in a future release, there’s no training, the training isn’t free, they can’t be automated, they can be automated, they can only be automated by rhesus monkeys imported illegally and cared for by specially trained zookeepers who wear leopard print hats.

• Microsoft Hyper-V sucks the second Tuesday of the month.
• Citrix XenServer sucks your dom0 three years ago.
• VMware ESXi sucks your budget.
• Xen sucks, openly.
• Oracle VM sucks and your license requires you to like it.
• VMware ESX sucks people’s cold, dead hands.
• Green Hills Software INTEGRITY Multivisor sucks as it screams its ridiculous name at you.
• IBM z/VM sucks in ways incomprehensible to anyone under 90 years of age.
• KVM sucks keyboards, video, and mice… wait, there’s another type of KVM?
• VMware Workstation sucks locally.
• VirtualBox sucks cross-platform.
• Microsoft Virtual PC sucks, duh.
• VirtualLogix VLX sucks in ways we’ve never heard about.
• Oracle Solaris LDOM sucks all the way to Larry Ellison’s tropical island.
• IBM PowerVM sucks $100 bills through the front of the server.
• HP Integrity VM sucks irrelevant CPU architectures.
• Parallels Server sucks Apple’s deep commitment to the enterprise.
• Parallels Workstation sucks, too.
• VMware Server/GSX sucks but that doesn’t stop people from clinging to the past.
• VMware Fusion sucks less than its host OS’s stance on virtualization.
• OpenVZ sucks.
• QEMU sucks in many different directions.

So there. This is in homage to the alt.sysadmin.recovery “The Canonical List of Operating Systems That Suck.” Feel free to leave additional hypervisor suckage in the comments.

Preemptive response to inevitable comment: OpenStack is not a hypervisor. Also, all cloud software sucks.