Move Over VMWare, Here Comes HyperV

By Michelle Savage

June 30, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)
This is an update to a story originally posted on June 30.

Virtual machine (VM) software is a hot commodity right now, and Microsoft’s out for a piece of that multi-billion-dollar pie. After nearly five years of work, Microsoft shipped Hyper-V virtualization for Windows Server 2008 in late June, a few weeks before the expected August delivery date.

According to Microsoft, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V offers customers a virtualization platform that plugs into Windows Server 2008, and allows them to consolidate their workloads. Hyper-V is free to users with a Windows Server 2008 license, and a standalone version, which is expected to hit the market by the end of this year, will cost $28 for a single physical server.

The question is: What will new competition from Microsoft do to VMware, the virtualization leader that built a US$2 billion business and was virtually competition-free for years? Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor is expected to cut into VMware’s market dominance, although it is not an apples-to-apples competitor.

Hyper-V lives inside the Microsoft server operating system, while VMware puts the operating system on top of the hypervisor. Also, unlike VMware, Hyper-V does not offer live migration or the ability to add memory to a virtual server while it’s running. Still, VMware shares took a tumble as soon as Hyper-V was released, dropping more than 10 percent over a two-day period. Days later, VMware’s board of directors announced a change in leadership by replacing company co-founder Diane Greene as president and CEO with Microsoft veteran Paul Maritz, a move that several analysts believe was fueled by Hyper-V’s entrance to the market. VMware would not comment on the move.

Microsoft said there have already been more than one million evaluations of Hyper-V, adding that customers can also use System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, now in beta, to help them best configure and deploy their hypervisor-based environments.

Pund-IT Research’s Charles King said that, while feedback from early adopters and beta testers on Hyper-V’s performance and stability has been very positive to date, it is hard to say whether Hyper-V poses any real threat to VMware just yet. “I think that, with the amount of attention given to Hyper-V over the past several months, people have lost sight of the fact that, until the product is out in the market and tested by third parties, it’s hard to match up the products side-by-side and feature-by-feature,” he said. “Now that Hyper-V is available and has hit the market and is available to the masses, it will be interesting to see how the products stack up next to each other.”

Related Search Term(s): Virtualization, Windows Server, Microsoft, VMware

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