We feel strongly that with Hyper-V, our platform and our management tools provide an excellent end to end solution. With that said, we know that you have investments in VMware but even in that case, our management 'engine' can make better decisions on the VMware platform. In addition, the System Center family of products gives you the ability to manage physical servers right alongside your virtual machines with a single set of integrated tools rather than creating a new silo or island within your organization.

He adds that by managing VMware, "we mean that day to day, you'll be able to use our console and command line interface to fully manage your Virtual Infrastructure environment (including live migration), Virtual Server and Hyper-V environments seamlessly. In addition, we'll be able to extend the management capabilities that VMware offers today so you'll get an enhanced solution even on a non-Windows OS."

Microsoft's activities in this space have been driven largely by customer and partner requests, he said.

Microsoft has had its Hyper-V virtualization technology in beta for several weeks and is slated to officially bring it to market later this year following the launch of Windows Server 2008. VMware executives, for their part, have sounded a note of optimism about the market generally and their position overall. VMware CEO Diane Greene told CRN recently that its hypervisor will be an important part of its direction going forward, noting "We can add so much functionality, like new hardware functionality, security and resource management."