{"id":1563,"date":"2008-09-08T13:54:58","date_gmt":"2008-09-08T18:54:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/2008\/09\/08\/microsoft-virtualization\/"},"modified":"2008-09-08T13:54:58","modified_gmt":"2008-09-08T18:54:58","slug":"microsoft-virtualization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/2008\/09\/08\/microsoft-virtualization\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft Virtualization &#8211; Clearing up the waiting bottle-neck"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Microsoft is finalizing its virtualization strategy and portfolio <a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/presspass\/events\/virtualization\/materials.mspx\">up in Bellevue<\/a> as I type. While <a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/\">James<\/a> is up there in person, giving a talk on how virtualization related to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.greenmonk.net\">green IT<\/a>, it seems like a good idea to briefly comment here.<\/p>\n<h2>Microsoft&#8217;s Virtualization Announcements &#8211; The Portfolio So Far<\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/Presspass\/press\/2008\/sep08\/09-07GetVirtualNowPR.mspx\">Here&#8217;s what they have<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Hyper-V, a hypervisor for running Linux and Windows. The price for this was set at the low cost of $28 (with theories and insinuations that this was the lowest it could go without tripping off anti-trust alarms), but now it&#8217;s a free download.<\/li>\n<li>System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, a management console and platform for working with Microsoft and VMWare virtualization.<\/li>\n<li>Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5, Microsoft&#8217;s answer to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/VDI\">VDI<\/a>, coming from the Softricity legacy.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Also of interest is that Microsoft demonstrated &#8220;live migration&#8221; in Windows Server 2008. This means moving a virtual machine from one physical host to the other, you know, live.<\/p>\n<h2>The Larger Context &#8211; King of the Hill<\/h2>\n<p>There&#8217;s a vendor hustle going on as we near <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vmworld.com\/conferences\/2008\/\">VMWare World<\/a> next week (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/sogrady\/\">Stephen<\/a> will be on the ground there). Microsoft&#8217;s finalization is much welcome as the industry &#8211; buyers, sellers, and watchers like myself &#8211; have all been waiting to see what Microsoft shows up with on the virtualization front. As I told a couple reporters last week, there really has been an attention bottle-neck in virtualization waiting to see Microsoft&#8217;s goods beyond the previews we&#8217;ve seen so far.<\/p>\n<p>After this announcement, one thing is incredibly clear: Microsoft wants to commoditize the hypervisor (read: make it difficult to charge for and differentiate on) and move the discussion up to the management level, beyond the nuts-and-bolts. Indeed, without having their own hyper-visors, this is what <a href=\"http:\/\/www.networkworld.com\/news\/2008\/090408-virt-man.html\">the likes of Big 4 IT Management vendors like BMC desperately want to do as well<\/a>. Even VMWare has said it knows this shift in value, if you will, is out there. Microsoft and others  would just like it come as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n<p>Others to watch here, coming fast and furious around VMWare, no doubt, are Citrix, Sun (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/2008\/08\/12\/xvm-server-videos\/\">see here<\/a>), and RedHat: the last of which <a href=\"http:\/\/www.redhat.com\/promo\/qumranet\/\">has already made moves with the acquisition of KVM &#8220;owner&#8221; Qumranet<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Here, the game is one thing: take as much of VMWare&#8217;s dominance and the religious zeal IT dollars have for it. Numerous studies, reports, and number-heads show that there&#8217;s a huge amount of virtualization left to be done. There&#8217;s plenty of virtualization IT spend in the next several years, and large IT vendors shudder to think that the majority of that will go to EMC\/VMWare.<\/p>\n<p>In a game like this, were there&#8217;s one big players, strange alliances come up with the rule of &#8220;the enemy of my enemy is my friend,&#8221; like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/virtualization\/partner-profile-sun.mspx\">Microsoft and Sun<\/a>, for example. That&#8217;s were things get fun for watchers like us.<\/p>\n<p>I was looking over some survey numbers recently and noticed a wide spread of virtualization <i>options<\/i>, with a huge chunk of usage, of course, in VMWare&#8217;s slot. More than the obvious dominance of VMWare, the interesting point is the fragmentation of options out there: when it comes to virtualization from the hypervisor up to management, now and in the upcoming year, there&#8217;s an overflowing cornucopia of options. Operationally, this means there&#8217;s more to consider, more innovation, and just more interesting things going on.<\/p>\n<p>In addition to the redefinition up to virtualization management. Tying together alliances to build up those fragmented market shares looks to be the thing to do now. We&#8217;ll keep our peepers open for who duct-tapes to who: it should be fun.<\/p>\n<p><b>Disclosure:<\/b> Microsoft, RedHat, and Sun are clients.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Microsoft is finalizing its virtualization strategy and portfolio up in Bellevue as I type. While James is up there in person, giving a talk on how virtualization related to green IT, it seems like a good idea to briefly comment here. Microsoft&#8217;s Virtualization Announcements &#8211; The Portfolio So Far Here&#8217;s what they have: Hyper-V, a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,34],"tags":[486,811],"class_list":["post-1563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-software","category-systems-management","tag-microsoft","tag-virtualization"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}