Microsoft Jockeying For Position In Virtualization Race

Rand Morimoto, president of Convergent Computing, an Oakland, Calif.-based solution provider, says that while Microsoft may lack some of the features and functions of certain VMware offerings, he has several customers who are handling their virtualization needs exclusively with Virtual Server 2005 and are finding it's a good fit for their environments.

"With Viridian, the expectation is that Microsoft is going to leapfrog VMware and never look back," said Morimoto. "Customers today can use Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, build up their images, and then when Viridian becomes available, easily transition over."

Microsoft also holds a trump card of sorts with its System Center portfolio, which provides management for both physical and virtual assets, and monitors the health of virtual machines and applications, said Larry Orecklin, general manager of Microsoft's System Center and Virtualization Group. "The more you virtualize, the more that management of the environment becomes important," he said.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager includes several features that organizations really care about when it comes to virtualization, such as the ease of creating images and the ability to clone images, said Morimoto. "Once you create one image, you can take that and clone it, and then change it to repurpose it for a new system. The ability to create one standard template and blow it out for multiple images is huge," he said.

Until recently, VMware held an advantage over Microsoft in the management of virtual machines. VMware's VirtualCenter management tool provides the type of enterprise-level performance that Microsoft lacked until it came out with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, according to Morimoto.

Microsoft's Challenges
But despite these advantages, some solution providers believe Microsoft is behind because it is missing key features found in competitors' offerings. For example, VMware's VMotion offering, which makes it possible to move running virtual machines from one physical server to another, has no equivalent in the Microsoft virtualization portfolio, said Cor Knijnenburg, CEO of Core Consulting, Plano, Texas. "If you have a mission-critical application in a virtual environment, that's a useful tool," he said.

Another feature that VMware has that Microsoft does not is support for 64-bit client sessions, according to Morimoto. "But right now, that's not a big issue because Exchange 2007, which is 64-bit, is just ramping up. Organizations can build on physical hardware today and then move to Viridian [which is 64-bit] later on," said Morimoto.

Solution providers say one of VMware's major advantages over Microsoft today is its ability to effectively "snapshot"—a function called VMotion. This feature comes into play when one virtual server fails and another comes up and switches sessions, providing disaster-recovery-type failover to another system.

Another looming challenge Microsoft faces is that nearly every other virtualization engine on the market is based on Linux in some shape or form, said Chris Ward, senior solutions architect at Greenpages, a solution provider in Kittery, Maine. "And you can be pretty sure that there's no way that Microsoft will have any Linux embedded in Viridian when it comes out," he said.

The bare metal footprint and the ability to customize the kernel are the primary reasons why many organizations prefer Linux-based virtualization, said Ward. With so-called hosted virtualization, the virtual layer runs on top of an operating system, but with bare metal virtualization, the hypervisor runs on the hardware itself.

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