VMware touts the “value of a mature platform”

With Microsoft’s long awaited announcement of the Beta release of its new virtualization platform, dubbed “Hyper-V” many people are asking what this means for the virtualization industry? Is Hyper-V a true response to VMware’s ESX? Is it too late for Microsoft to catch up to the nearly 10 years of research, development, and deployment in the rest of the industry — mainly by VMware? These are all great questions which time will hold the answers. When I say time, I really mean about the next year or so. I believe that within a year, and Micrsoft having the release of their next-gen server platforms under their belt, we will have a much clearer picture as to where they fit into the big picture.

VMware’s response to all this? Réza Malekzadeh, Sr. Director, Product Marketing & Alliances wrote Monday in his blog:

“…customers don’t see virtualisation as a nice little add-on to server operating systems; it’s a technology they are using to architect entire data centers, and for these kind of implementations they want software which is robust, stable, proven in production environments and provides the management tools and levels of automation which takes the pain out of IT management.”

It sounds like a valid and fairly substantiated view to me. Personally, I believe Microsoft will enter the Virtualization market in much the same way they entered the DBMS market several years back: well aware, although contrary to the tone of their marketing, that they are in no position to compete at the enterprise level…. yet. They will gain a presence at the workgroup and department levels and fill theose needs for virtualization with virtually (no pun intended) no administration overhead. It’s fairly safe to say, you won’t need a dedicated Hyper-V administrator anytime soon, much the way you likely don’t need a dedicated Micrsofot SQL SErver administrator. Ultimately, Microsoft will win the hearts of the business analysts and will ultimately have a product that they can put into an enterprise environment and compete (?) with the big players like VMware. We’ll see.