Things are heating up in the hypervisor and virtualization software space with Microsoft’s release of the Hyper-V within Windows Server 2008 and adding VMware support to Microsoft System Center products. (The standalone Hyper-V release is a few months out.) My son Phill is working with Windows Server 2008 and has a lot of good things to report about it. Embedding Hyper-V technology into the Server 2008 operating systems is clearly Microsoft’s Trojan horse strategy to seed its virtualization technology into Microsoft shops and help displace VMware. Microsoft isn’t making it any easier on VMware by adding support for 3rd party virtualization products in System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
Many say that hypervisor technology will become commoditized. That will only happen if and when all the hypervisor technologies are more-or-less functionally equivalent and don’t offer stronger value against competing technologies. My friend Chirs Hoff talks about the thinning of hypervisors a lot, which is in part driving this commoditization. With VMware’s market lead and Microsoft’s ability to leverage virtualization into their entire product line, the value’s being pushed up the software stack.
But we are much more likely to be in a battle of competing hypervisors and full virtualization software suites, if we aren’t already. VMware, Microsoft, Sun, Xen… all the virtualization vendors are differentiating more so in their virtualization management capabilities. This is where the real battle is and will continue to take place, particularly as virtualization becomes prominent in more than just the data center. Cisco’s already moving there for virtualized networks, and any sane operating system has got to be refactoring their strategies for application virtualization, and cloud software and application services.
In the near term, we’ll still hear about hypervisors and why one’s better than the next. But better doesn’t always win. Footprint, integration, manageability, cross-platform support, market clout, etc., can accelerate the selection of the market winner. If Hyper-V catches a foothold in Microsoft shops, and I have no reason to believe it won’t, Microsoft will be and is a dominant player in virtualization.
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