Hyper-V Needs a Pit Crew

One aspect of the staggered release of Hyper-V and VMM 2008 is the focus on how to manage virtualization ... any virtualization environment, but specifically Microsoft's. What this article also points out is that VMM 2008 starts out by demonstrating its capabilities to manage multi-vendor environments.

The article ends with Mitchell Ashley expressing doubt about the relative price to the customer for using VMM 2008 versus VMware's VirtualCenter. In my view, he doesn't come right out and say that the comparison is bogus, but he should. If a datacenter's use of VMware depends on ESX functionality like VMotion, DRS (an automated VMotion) or HA (high availability), the customer has to buy VirtualCenter. That makes the price of VMM 2008 an additional cost to the datacenter ... not the cost of substituting it for VirtualCenter.


Hyper-V May Cause Hyper Tension | NetworkWorld.com Community

Microsoft needs a successful Hyper-V launch out in the marketplace to begin to stave off VMware's dominance. But Hyper-V can't do it alone, that's only part of the picture. Just having Hyper-V is like having a NASCAR race car but no pit crew. Hyper-V's got to have the management tools to be successfully utilized by IT. Most agree; the hypervisor will be a commodity, it's the management capabilities enabling customers to manage virtualized environments that will win the day. ...

What's needed most to deploy software on Hyper-V at any scale is Microsoft's Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM). VMM just went into beta and is expected to ship 30 to 60 days after Hyper-V's release, making the product launch likely sometime in early fall.

VMM's making some interesting claims about managing virtualization. Not only is VMM 2008 managing Hyper-V, Virtual Server, but also VMware's ESX product. Microsoft isn't claiming VMM is a full replacement for VMware's Virtual Center product, but is claiming a significant portion of what Virtual Center does can be done within VMM. ... The VMM team's blog post is claiming Microsoft does all this at one third the cost of VMware, but that's an incremental cost if you are already a VMware Virtual Center customer. And we'll have to see if Hyper-V and VMM are competitive against VMware in new accounts where VMware doesn't already have a presence.