Microsoft’s release of Hyper-V today marks the beginning of a race between Microsoft and market leading hypervisor vendor VMware to build out advanced management capabilities that will ultimately win over customers.
Hypervisor technology could become free from most vendors, industry watchers say, which will drive vendors to make revenue on other capabilities, such as management. Aside from the revenue-generating potential management technology offers the vendors, it will be imperative that enterprise companies deploying virtualization across production environments construct and execute an effective management strategy.
VMware today has the obvious edge over Microsoft with multiple management capabilities developed in-house and gained through acquisitions that many customers depend upon to manage their mostly VMware environments. Microsoft will be playing catch up for now, but the need to manage physical resources as well as multi-platform environments could help the company gain ground.
“VMware’s focus is of course primarily at the virtualization layer. Administrators, however, may need tools that not only provide insight into the health of the hypervisor, but also provides detailed knowledge of the guest virtual machine as well as the physical hardware that the virtualization technology runs on top of or interacts with [i.e., storage, network and so forth],” says Cameron Haight, research vice president at Gartner.
And while VMware technology can be found in nearly all enterprise companies deploying virtualization, the vendor may have overlooked the little guy. Small businesses haven’t adopted virtualization as much as their larger counterparts, but because Hyper-V is a free download for Windows 2008 Server customers, Microsoft could penetrate the low end of the market and work its way up.
“The enterprise is going to be very leery of Microsoft, but the on-ramp to VMware is a bit steep for small businesses. VMware doesn’t want to lose that potential business, but the company was getting a bit drunk on enterprise dollars,” says Thomas Bittman, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst. “Microsoft could grab small businesses and grow up, and VMware should do anything it can do to get that market share, even if it costs revenue.”
As Microsoft scrambles to catch VMware, IT managers now have another option for x86 virtual server technology.
