Monday, September 8, 2008

Microsoft Hyper-V against VMware ESXi again

Hm, the competitor never sleeps, we could say after Microsoft revealed the plan to release Hyper-V Server 2008 platform without Windows (read more at microsoft.com). I'm not able to imagine it but Microsoft developed a minimal version of Windows with the most necessary parts of OS - kernel and drivers - which are loaded in the parent partition. It should be similar to VMware ESXi which is not more dependent on service console. That means the customer doesn't need to invest to the Windows Server 2008 licence. The whole new product should be released within 30 days and it will be free of charge.

By the way, the VMware products are still leaders. And they will be. The stability, performance, central management of virtual environment or enterprise features are more mature than new toys from Microsoft. Let's mention the only one - VMotion technology. It is said Microsoft is going to support live migration of virtual machines in Windows Server 2008 R2 which will not be out before 2010 (details at zdnet.com). I think it's quite late...

2 comments:

Martin Vincenc said...

absolutely agree with you, David.
VMware brings up Storage Vmotion, SRM, EVC, DPM.
I can use my VC with Lab Manager, Stage Manager and Lifecycle Manager. It cost some money, but it works. Now.

Anyway, David, did you heared about Koala?
http://www.bluebearllc.net/kodiak/

It looks really good, I'm currious about the linux client. Finally!

David Sumsky said...

Thank you for the link. I haven't heard about it yet so I'm going to check it. Another interesting virtual machine management solution is oVirt. It's a pity it supports KVM hypervisor only. But it should support XEN as well in near future. The product is hosted at ovirt.org