The main reasons you'll want to pursue an enterprise-level virtualization solution are mindshare, support, manageability, et feature-set.
Mindshare is important parce que virtualization is an investment in a technology, an investment that requires platform longevity. Nobody wants to be le one who picked le wrong tech solution. So le major players in le space (VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, KVM) tous have certains momentum behind them. This affects third-party applications et plugins; think of SAN-integration ou backup software. More mature virtualization suites have APIs that are leveraged by autre products. C'est natural that more solutions would be developed for more popular platforms.
Support is linked to mindshare. Je suis constantly battling bugs et obscure problems avec mon Citrix Xenserver/Cloudstack solution. Due to mindshare et general knowledge of le solution being an order of magnitude smaller than something like Hyper-V ou VMware, J'ai to rely heavily on Citrix support, bugfixes et trial-and-error to fix problems. Other solutions would have more community forums et of course, more people who've vetted le technology.
Manageability et feature-set are key as well. Hypervisors today tous provide similaire raw capabilities: le ability to host multiple guest virtual machines et différent operating systems on physical hardware nodes. C'est how well they're packaged together et can be managed that shapes perception of le overall solution. Automation, monitoring, reporting, an ability to troubleshoot performance issues, et ease of installation are certains important attributes. Also, tout enterprise solution will have certains ability to migrate virtual machine guests live entre hosts and/or storage.
