Microsoft has a three-pronged strategy to beat VMware in the virtualization market, according to the company's senior director for virtualization product management, Zane Adam.
A key part of that strategy is Hyper-V Server 2008, the hypervisor, which Microsoft made available for download last week. In any virtualization strategy, the hypervisor is the core, and Microsoft sees it as so important that it is giving it away free to attract more customers.
But, as Adam explained, in order to beat VMware in virtualization, Microsoft needs more than just a good hypervisor. Speaking at the VM08 conference in London last week, Adam told ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet UK how Microsoft was approaching the battle. "We have a large portfolio of products and a combined physical-and-virtual infrastructure in one, that [is] offered at a price point which is an industry lead," he said.
But the main target for Microsoft, Adam made clear, was VMware. "Choice is always good for customers," he said, "[so] instead of playing my hypervisor versus VMware we decided we're going to leap-frog VMware, and the way we are going to leap-frog them is through our management solutions".
This meant that "instead of [using] the old model, you can manage the physical and virtual infrastructure", Adam said. The "old model", as he sees it, was to create an environment which has lock-in — once you start using the company's systems, you are committed to using those systems and perhaps paying higher prices because of that. In an open environment, the user is free to try systems and, if they want to, drop them and shift to other systems with no penalty. By offering the hypervisor and perhaps other software for free, users can try things out.
"Our management products and our hypervisor are open, so that others can manage it and we can manage others", Adam said. "That way, you get heterogeneous interoperability, versus VMware's model, where they only manage themselves and keep it closed."
Tony Lock, program director with analysts Freeform Dynamics, said that, in the area of management, Microsoft had the right idea. "The key to virtualization is management, management, management," he said. "They have got that right."
Microsoft knows that virtualization is at the very early stages at the moment, Lock said. He pointed out that server virtualization often covers tens of virtualized systems in a company but, with desktop virtualization, that amount could run into the hundreds or thousands of machines being virtualized, which raises much bigger issues.
"Microsoft is very interested in getting its [virtualization] tools out there...in heterogeneous, interoperable systems," Lock said. "It is not just about the hypervisor."
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