Which of these companies sounds more qualified?
July 7th, 2008 | 
Author: The title of this post is part of a quote from David Davis’ SearchCIO article titled COMPARISON: Microsoft vs. VMware. David’s article was published back on June 4, and it’s been sitting in my drafts “screaming at me” to comment on here at VM /ETC. Now, with Hyper-V having been released and Microsoft’s marketing machine starting to cloud virtualization reality, I point my readers to David’s arguments as examples of sane and logical analysis of the two products. Here’s the entire quote my title is taken from in the context it was written:
“VMware is obviously the most experienced company when it comes to delivering a virtualisation product. The company has 10 years of virtualisation experience and a huge customer base, including 100% of the Fortune 500 companies and 92% of the Fortune 1000, totaling over 100,000 customers worldwide. VMware also holds 11 virtualisation patents, and in 2007 their revenue hit the $US1.33 billion mark.
This is in comparison to Microsoft which has a new virtualisation product, little enterprise virtualisation experience, and, to date, no Fortune 500 customers who have adopted their enterprise virtualisation product in a production environment. Ask yourself, which of these companies sounds more qualified to deliver your enterprise virtualisation solution?”
David’s article goes on to make excellent comparison points about
support, reliability, 64 bit hardware requirements, Quick Migration vs VMotion, DRS vs NLB, and various other features not matched by Microsoft such as Storage VMotion.
However, reports on the Internet have touted Hyper-V’s price as the ultimate undoing of VMware. David’s article has some interesting costs analysis too.
“To get Microsoft’s Hyper-V, all you need to do is to buy an edition of Windows Server 2008. The cost for that is between $US999 and $US3999. If you use Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition, at a cost of close to $US4000, you can run up to 4 guests inside of it without
having to buy additional Windows licenses.However, if you go with Windows Server 2008 standard you will have to buy a license for the host system, as well as each guest OS. And does this include support? No. Are the features the same between ESXi and Hyper-V? No. Suddenly, Hyper-V isn’t as free as it sounded nor as much
of a value.”
David does a much better job explaining the real pricing of Hyper-V then I did in my “Hyper-V costs $28. Yeah Right!” post.
Don’t get me wrong. I have established my career on Microsoft products and certifications. I want Microsoft Hyper-V to become a solid option for consolidating systems as virtual guests. I believe in the multi virtualization vendor data center. It’s just frustrating to hear the market analysts and industry journalists talk about Hyper-V as the answer to VMware VI3. Once again, David sums up my thoughts:
“In the end, it is my opinion that VMware “wins the war” for several reasons. Perhaps most obvious, is that Microsoft is already incredibly behind VMware in terms of virtualisation know-how and may never catch up.”
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Posted in feature comparison, hyper-v, microsoft, server 2008, vi3, vmware | 
Tags: feature comparison, hyper-v, microsoft, server2008, vi3, virtualization, vmware, windows
