Will Microsoft Hyper-V 1.0 be enough to take on VMware?

By David Marshall
published: Wednesday, July 09 2008

So while "Microsoft versus VMware" seemed to have the right title to sell tickets, Microsoft just didn't have the right ammunition to make this battle the title fight that people were looking forward to watching.  In spite of lacking an arsenal, it was apparent that a battle between Microsoft and VMware was brewing... and it wouldn't take the likes of Don King to promote it either.  The fight was inevitable. 

Even though VMware has the lion's share of the market today, Microsoft is no stranger to entering a market that is so dominated by a single player.  For crying out loud, people still bring up ‘Microsoft versus Netscape' and ‘Microsoft versus NetWare'.  Both markets were dominated by a strong player with a solid product, and yet Microsoft still entered the fight with a less than equal product, only to come out on top in the end. 

... most industry experts don't believe that Microsoft is ready to take on VMware

With the release of Microsoft Hyper-V in June of 2008, Microsoft finally produced a hypervisor it could call its own and be proud of.  And perhaps with it, Microsoft may finally have what it needs to create a true virtualization title match between itself and VMware.

But most industry experts don't believe that Microsoft is ready to take on VMware for the heavy weight title in the virtual squared circle.  Why?  Most believe that Microsoft Hyper-V is not yet ready for primetime in the enterprise market; instead, they believe the new hypervisor product will see greater success if it were to go after small to medium-size companies, at least in the near term.  This is a largely Windows-based segment and an area of strength for Microsoft.    

Indeed, Microsoft may find it a difficult challenge to take on VMware in the enterprise market while it is still missing key components in its product such as live virtual machine migration, automated virtual machine failover, and the ability to balance workloads and provide policy-based capacity.  Another vital component currently missing from Microsoft's virtualization challenge is a solid management platform.  To address that, Microsoft has plans to introduce System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) to market; however, the product is currently in Beta and still looks to be a few months away from GA.  When it does get released, the management product will offer its Quick Migration feature which will execute the live migration of a virtual machine - though it won't be instantaneous, taking five or more seconds to complete.

While VMware technology can be found in nearly all large enterprise organizations deploying virtualization, they seemed to have overlooked the smaller corporations and effectively relinquished the SMB market to others while they focused on accumulating larger enterprise dollars.  Small to medium-sized businesses haven't adopted virtualization technologies as quickly as their larger counterparts, partly because of price and complexity.  But Microsoft is removing the pricing barrier by effectively making Hyper-V free with the purchase of Microsoft Windows Server 2008.  And with most of the SMB organizations being Windows shops, Microsoft is letting them know that if you can install Windows Server 2008 and you have familiarity with Windows server features and roles, you can easily move forward with virtualization.

So if Microsoft ends up taking the bottoms up approach with its virtualization offering, it looks as though the titan battle could be postponed yet again.  With that said, Microsoft doesn't have a walk in the park in the SMB market either.  Instead, the company will find itself going up against the likes of Virtual Iron Software which has quietly been building its own base in the SMB market with over 2,000 deployments to date.  Virtual Iron isn't new to fighting giants, having gone toe-to-toe with VMware these past few years with the mantra of ‘we offer similar functionality to that of VMware ESX Server but at a fraction of the cost.'        

Ed Walsh, CEO of Virtual Iron said, "Like VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3, Virtual Iron offers a comprehensive solution with advanced capabilities such as the live migration of virtual machines, CPU load balancing, automatic recovery of virtual machines and power management.  It also includes a comprehensive management console the equivalent of VMware Virtual Center."

Walsh also told me that unlike VMware, Virtual Iron is a fraction of the cost and the product is easier to learn, install and deploy - two of the primary reasons for its success in the SMB market. 

So if Microsoft does take Hyper-V into the SMB market first, it could be a story of David and Goliath rather than the story of two titans.  Either way, Microsoft is ready to release Hyper-V into battle.  But make no mistake, as it continues to improve its hypervisor technology, all eyes are focused on VMware's market share.

Microsoft Hyper-V , Connectix