This post is aimed at the ESX community. Consider this a cautionary tale in regards to the ESX vs. Hyper-V war that is on the horizon (I’ve always wanted to use the term cautionary tale in a post, now I have!) I’m gonna pull out my crystal ball for a second and take a crack a predicting the future.
The sleeping virtualization giant of Microsoft is now awake and there is more than one way to gain market share. We have many past examples of products that have been good enough (the right features at the right price) that have gone on to reduce the market leaders to niche products. Will Microsoft crush VMWare? Probably not. Will they become a competitor in this market that we will HAVE to pay attention too? Yes they will.
Remember one thing… ESX didn’t always have VMotion, DRS, HA, NFS and Virtual Center. We were creating flagship users and doing everything through the MUI (or the command line) and guess what, it was good enough. It was the right features at the right price.
In many ways, the features we all know and love spoil us. If you have been doing virtualization for years, it is easy to lose sight of the beginner’s view to virtualization. This beginner’s view is the Microsoft market.
Many people say VMWare will always rule the virtualization world. VMWare has a head start and some technologies that simply can’t be touched by the competition today. In addition, they are always adding products and features to turn virtualization from a commodity based stand alone product into an advanced eco-system with many unique features that both virtualization competiors and physical servers just can’t reproduce. VMWare has done a fantastic job levering emerging technology into usable products. They will hold the technology lead for years to come. But, if you think for a second that Microsoft can’t out spend VMWare in R&D to play catch up, you’re fooling yourself.
Some may ask where the Citrix Xen product is at in all of this. Honestly, I don’t know. I haven’t been exposed to the product very much. They seem to be caught in the middle. They can’t compete with VMWare on enterprise level virtualization technologies and they can’t compete on the low end with Microsoft’s price point. What sets them apart in the market? Time will tell…
What are your thoughts?
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I work in the Small Business space, here in Switzerland. I’m coming from the other direction - or what you would call a beginner’s view.
A typical Small Business does not have server sprawl, datacenter space issues, datacenter heat issues. Instead, they have a one to a few servers that run their infrastructure. Only very demanding application like Exchange or SQL Server may get their own machines, otherwise everything runs on one machine.
Now, where would you virtualize here? The problem is application compatability - getting several management apps for virus scanners, management, monitoring, etc. work on a single server can be hard, and it can also provide to be a management nightmare.
So your usual Small Business will need virtualization for one thing: application segregation. Up to now, this was done using a free product, like VMware Server or Microsofts Virtual Server. They worked, but the performance with both was, to but it simple, shitty.
Hyper-V now offers a way to use virtualization without having to use 3rd party products (which is always a good way to reduce complexity). Now, reliability is key in a Small Business - they can’t afford multiple servers, failover. Hyper-V brings all this to the market.
And why would they switch products when they get bigger? By then, they’ll already know a lot about Hyper-V.
Another point, for which everyone else would probably scold me, is the fact that you can use Hyper-V on an already existing WS08 Server, without compromising any running applications - yes, Microsoft does not recommend this, and for a good reason - but Money is so much more important in a Small Business than running recommended configurations.
Internally, i’ve been using Hyper-V since almost half a year. The experience has been great - the performance is very good, and the handling is also easy.
The free ESXi is mostly not an alternative for me. Why? Hardware compatibility. Even low end servers are certified WS08 - not so with ESXi.
Lukas - Thank you very much for your comments and insight! I think you very nicely summarized exactly where I was going with this post. I firmly believe that in a few years, and with the right development, Microsoft will be in a position to compete with VMWare. Start small, make the product good enough, and grow over time. Many people forget this is exactly the formula VMWare used to achieve success.