VMware-Microsoft battle taking shape
That Microsoft has its sights set on the virtualization market dominated today by VMware is nothing new. However, the announcements Microsoft made on Monday show that the company is putting a tremendous amount of resources toward moving from vision to reality, analyst say.
Microsoft's approach of having a data center that can respond dynamically to business needs, while still years off, is compelling, said Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett. Virtualization is a key component that can take the Dynamic Systems Initiative of a few years ago and make it approach reality.
Now, Microsoft is far from alone in this vision. I've heard similar talk over the years from Hewlett-Packard, Veritas (now Symantec), IBM and others.
But clearly a fire has been lit under Microsoft, which was comparatively late to the virtualization game, despite its 2003 purchase of Connectix.
It should be an interesting battle between Microsoft and VMware.
"VMware has a first mover advantage and a head start," Gillett said. "But Microsoft's model-based approach to it is a more appealing ideal."
That ideal, though, will take some time.
"We believe VMware has a broader product portfolio and it will take some time for Microsoft to match the breadth, probably until 2010," Gillett said.
The moves come as virtualization is entering the mainstream on the server side and a looming presence on the desktop. Forrester said a recent survey showed half of businesses using server virtualization currently, with two-thirds planning to by next year. On the desktop, things are more nascent, with just over a quarter of businesses saying they either are using PC virtualization or will do so in the next 12 months.
During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft. E-mail Ina.
Besides the MS pateented issues like poor performance and freshman CS security mistakes, the biggest question is, will MS support other OS's?
If they don't it will be yet another 'me-too' failure that MS has perfected over the past few years.
If they want a change of being a legitimate contender, they will have to at least match VMWare feature for feature and be reasonably priced.
Anyone want to bet that this will be the case?
It is stable if properly configured and if you rolled it out to customers without having done that, that is the fault of your company, not VMWare.
[i]"It's so risky not having real servers."[/i]
It doesn't have to be... I keep snapshots of the more important VM instances across multiple servers, and they all feed off of a highly-redundant SAN rig. If one machine dies or a VM instance on it does, another can be quickly brought to life. No downtime while waiting for hardware, even w/ a 4-hour delivery contract.
Personally, I believe in balance. VM's are great for some things (build servers, scratch servers, migration aids, rollout servers, test servers), but lousy (and IMHO dangerous) for others (user authentication, source code repositories, backup/DR servers... critical stuff like that).
The problem with management sometimes is that they just got done spending a boatload of cash on a solution, so they try and justify it as much as possible, by parking (literally) everything they can on a VM. It's idiocy, and it will come back to bite them (and anyone under 'em dumb enough to agree to help do it).
Risk can't be removed, but it can be minimized on VMs (see also SAN's, multiple snapshots spread across physical servers, etc). It just takes a bit of forethought and planning to get it right.
/P
Steve Ballmer will go on those pathetic cable tv business interview shows and offer to bite through a truck tire to prove how passionate he is about MSFT's virtualization product. Faced with a psycho like Ballmer, the reporters will smile pleasantly and agree to a demonstration while sharpshooting teams are put into position to take down the insane CEO with tranquilizer rounds.
- There's more than VMWare and Microsoft out there...
-
by enovikoff
January 22, 2008 2:41 AM PST
- My company uses Xen on top of 3Tera's AppLogic to deliver utility-billed hosted computing. We got into this business because this combination is so far ahead of VMWare, and it makes Microsoft's catch-up game uninteresting - unless you like necrophilia. The name of the game in virtualization is manageability: having a stack of servers with hundreds of virtual servers in them is a nightmare waiting to happen the first moment something fails, but AppLogic will restart failed virtual servers on new hardware automatically. Microsoft will have to beat AppLogic and its competitors, not just provide virtualization, which itself is a commodity now.
-
Reply to this comment
-
(10 Comments)-Eric Novikoff
http://www.ComputingUtility.com