VM /ETC

I thought the same thing and searched last night. Found this quote the implies they were planning Hyper-V support before the ESXi mess,

http://www.veeam.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t… where they state,

“Yes, most certainly – Hyper-V is our next big thing. But not because of this situation, of course – we've planned this much earlier. Many of our large customers told us they already have, or are planning to have heterogeneous virtual environments (2-3 hypervisors). And they all want heterogeneous tools to manage them.”

Paul

I guess people want heterogenous environments because VMware software with even basic capabilities is excessively expensive, and in the future not going to be worth near the price premium in most cases, especially for lab/software test environments.

Free ESXi is nice, but not that attractive anymore (compared to other options), doesn't even provide entry level capability like backups or live migration.

The biggest reason to pick VMware is they have the most mature product, with the best multi-OS support, and some features none of the others have, but that's changing as the gap narrows, and the list of unique necessary features in VMware dwindles. I'll grant VMware still has the greatest featureset at the high end, if you can afford the expensive licenses to deploy the high end software, that is.

“Enterprise+ users get Host Profiles” isn't going to change the mind of a SMB considering Essentials, anyways.

A big part of that featureset is provided by third parties like Veeam, special products that provide time and cost savings, and are only available if you use VMware. By keeping their prices so high at the mid-end, they give competitors a lot of room to spring up and undercut them.

Naturally it's in the third-parties interest to support all hypervisors with their products, for maximum sales, as other hypervisors take hold.

I maintain that if one year ago, VMware had done away with per-CPU licensing, re-priced vCenter at $500, and offered VMware Enterprise at a flat ~$1000/server inclusive of SnS, there would have been very little interest in anyone competing with them.

VMware would have been ubiquitous, remained THE hypervisor, and the profits enormous — there are free Open Source hypervisors, but they can't easily compete in a timely way with VMware due to disparity in funding development (not without someone large such as Citrix providing funding for development).

I finally got around to reading this! Great post Rich! Sorry I missed it earlier this week. I also put up a link on http://veeammeup.com/2009/07/veeam-announces-co… and I'll give you a trackback.

Thanks again, I'll wear my UGH shirt with pride!

-doug

And here is what Microsoft thinks about this:
http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive…

A small update. It seems that Veeam backup & Replications has started to offer a full support for VMware ESXi. I have read a bit about their announcement earlier today at:

http://www.virtualizationteam.com/veeam/veeam-b…

I hope that help.