It's All About Virtual Management

There is a ton of discussion about the impact Microsoft and Hyper-V will have in the server virtualization  market. I would argue that it’s not about the impact that Microsoft’s Hyper-V will have, it’s about the adoption and traction of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), Microsoft’s virtual server management solution.. No one argues the fact that end users will evaluate and test Hyper-V and if I still ran an IT shop I would do the same regardless of whether I had implemented another flavor of server virtualization or not.

The game is not a match up between the different hypervisors. Ultimately, the hypervisor becomes a negligible part of the architectural decision process and the management solution is what matters. Yes, there may currently be value and architectural advantage in one hypervisor over the other, but expect that gap to close quickly and the majority of workloads to run and perform near equally regardless of the hypervisor.

SCVMM will be able to manage both Hyper-V and ESX environments from a single console and there is an advantage here. Granted, current VMware customers will have to do a little jumping around if they plan to leverage features such as VMware Site Recovery Manager, but there is still a giant benefit to using SCVMM to manage a heterogeneous environment.

So what does all this mean? Assuming IT shops evaluate and adopt SCVMM as the standard management platform, the impact Microsoft could have will be far greater than Hyper-V will have standing on its own. When IT chooses a hypervisor, it is easy to change, but when an IT shop hangs its hat on a management solution, it typically sticks and the impact of change is significant.

If we expand our vision a little wider, we  see companies like Virtual Iron are smartly focusing on virtual server management.  Instead of touting the capabilities of its hypervisor layer,  Virtual Iron is advertising the benefits of  its management capabilities and a virtual server management architecture that’s’ designed to be partner-friendly.  Virtual Iron’s strategy further validates that the hypervisor layer is turning into a commodity and what matters now is virtual management.

Comments

[Tony Asaro]

Mark,

I agree that is about managing the virtual servers - which is fundamental in any multi-user, multi-system, multi-application environment. Common tasks such as provisioning storage for applications running on virtual servers requires sophisticated coordination - and if not handled well - could lead to lost and corrupt data.

One thing - we do more than "advertise" - we actually have a robust virtual server management platform.

Tony