After a little 3-day hiatus of flying a single engine airplane across the country from San Diego, CA to Massachusetts, I am back in action. Spending 3 days in a little single engine plane using nothing but ground references to pick my way across the United States is a trip I will never forget and could spend hours telling you stories about.
Now back to virtualization. Last week I spent two days at Microsoft Management Summit and another two days at Interop in lovely Las Vegas. Here are some highlights.
- Instead of battle testing Hyper-V directly against VMware ESX, Microsoft is going after the market from a management angle. VMM (Virtual Machine Manager) can manage both Hyper-V and ESX and I have to believe that they will soon be able to manage Citrix XenServer. In other words…..forget about the hypervisor, it is the management tools that really matter.
- Microsoft made a big deal about being able to live migrate virtual machines without causing any application downtime – a feature that they do not have today. Currently VMware has VMotion, which enables this exact feature, and the current beta versions of Hyper-V and VMM have what they call Quick Migration, which does cause some downtime, but it can be measured in seconds, not minutes. Quick Migration is much better than the current situation most users have in their physical server world. So, in any case, Microsoft made it a point to say that they will have Live Migration, but I really don’t think it is going to necessarily stop anyone from implementing Hyper-V.
- Recent ESG research and Microsoft's aggresive go to market strategy do in fact suggest that Microsoft has the potential to exceed ESX production workload deployments in the next 12-18 months if performance is equal or better, a security vulnerability is not discovered and Microsoft can accelerate its product's RTM (release to manufacturing) into the late summer.
- I also sat down with Robb Mapp, an analyst relations manager at Microsoft, for a quick interview. If you are interested to hear what I had to say, you can check out the video here.
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