HOUSTON, TX--Microsoft has released a collection of virtualization products that the company says demonstrates its interest in capturing the server virtualization market.
During his keynote Wednesday at Microsoft's 2008 Worldwide Partner Conference here, Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of infrastructure server marketing, said the company intends to capture the vast majority of servers that are not running virtualization technology.
To that end, Kelly announced a set of new virtualization products, starting with the company's hypervisor virtualization system, Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008, that is available via Windows Update.
He added that Hyper-V would cost a third of that offered by competitor, VMware.
Kelly also announced two other virtualization products slated for launch on 8 Sep. this year, which are currently in beta version--System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 and Microsoft Application Virtualization.
Microsoft had made reference to a "management tool" for virtualization management--likely SCVMM--during the February launch of Windows Server 2008, which the company claimed would help bring virtualization to more servers by easing implementation.
IDC, too, believes pushing management tools will catalyze adoption. Stephen Elliot, research director for the analyst firm's enterprise systems management software and IT management service division, said requests for management tools will remain top on customer lists for the next two years.
"Managing physical infrastructure is easier than managing virtual infrastructure today, because there aren't enough tools for virtual architecture," said Elliot, during a presentation at the conference. The analyst added that managing virtualization on the business end will also be of great concern to IT managers.
"Many companies are still trying to determine management disciplines around [virtualization]," he said.
Elliot said Microsoft's efforts at pushing virtualization will see the Windows Server platform dominate the server virtualization market, with a 58.2 percent share, by 2012. The analyst noted that this will displace open source OSes from their collective market lead at 50 percent in 2007, to 31.2 percent by 2012.
Elliot said virtualization will be "key in future data center build-outs", as hardware spending flattens through to 2010 but administration costs quadruple and power and cooling costs go up by eight times.
Virtualization, which has been heralded for its ability to increase data center efficiency, is expected to play a big part in addressing the energy crunch, he said.
He advised customers to think, amid the marketing hype around hypervisor technology, "more strategically along the application stack" and the cost savings that could be accrued from this approach.
In addition, developers should "step up" and factor in virtualization compatibility in their application development, Elliot said.
Other product announcements
In addition to the new virtualization products, Microsoft's Kelly also revealed that SQL Server 2008 will be available in August with no price increase.
Two server suites are also now available in Release Candidate 1 (RC1) versions: Windows Small Business Server 2008 and Windows Essential Business Server 2008. Their commercial launch is set for 12 Nov. 2008.
Victoria Ho reported from Microsoft's 2008 Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, Texas.
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