When it arrives, Microsoft hypervisor will outshine VMware

"I used to enjoy covering VMware," laments Ashlee Vance in a blog posting at the Channel Register. "In the good old days, CEO Diane Greene would stop by the office to chat about everything, ... She never tried to oversell the products. She embraced a humble, intelligent approach to discussing VMware's products and plans."

But, after last weeks' VMworld conference in San Francisco and VMware’s splashy IPO (“documented here in pornographic detail,” Ashlee says), there is nothing humble left about VMware. When you become a rival of Microsoft, that’s when you’ve really made it.Today, Microsoft's marketing machine is all about the "hey, we have time" - asserting that only five percent of servers use virtualization.

"As best as I can tell, Microsoft relies on 2005 data from a large analyst house to back up this statement. Even if it doesn't, the point is muted by the fact that VMware has already inserted itself into the consciousness of server customers everywhere."

Nevertheless, none of VMware's market lead might mount to a hill of beans when Microsoft does enter the market. It can tweak its operating system to dance beautifully with Viridian. It can embed virtualization software in its operating system for free. (If its antitrust problems don't prevent that, but given that Red Hat and Novell include server virtualization in their products, it is likely that Microsoft will do the same).

VMware's best defense will be ESX Server 3i:

"a 32MB version of its flagship product that can and will be embedded into the flash memory of servers. Dell, IBM, HP, Fujitsu and others have lined up to include ESX 3i in the memory of at least one system each. So, you can boot right into VMware without touching an operating system, and VMware's hypervisor starts to look like a standard server component."

The question is ... will server managers want to deal with a more complex hardware component for virtualization, complete with management tools? Or, providing Viridian works as advertised, will they be content to simply manage virtualization via familiar Windows methodology?

• Data Center
• Microsoft
• Microsoft
• Viridian
• VMware