VMware Apologizes To Microsoft For Hyper-V Bashing
In a Thursday blog post, Scott Drummonds, a technical marketing manager at VMware, admitted that he exercised bad judgment in posting the video and said he has removed it from Youtube. "Unfortunately, my intention to stir the pot with eye-poking banter has put my credibility and by association VMware's credibility in question among some of you. For this I apologize," Drummonds wrote.
The crudely produced video, created by one of VMware's benchmarking teams, shows a variety of Hyper-V crashes to make the point that Hyper-V is prone to fail under the stress of consolidated workloads. The video also suggests that these failures were the cause of an outage that hit MSDN and TechNet in late April.
Microsoft's virtualization team responded with a wave of vitriol, calling the video "defamatory," challenging VMware to document its testing methodology, and demanding that VMware pull the video from Youtube.
VMware's initial response was that the video wasn't intended for public consumption, but company officials defended their testing methodology and declined to remove the video. Why VMWare changed its mind six weeks after the fact is anyone's guess.
The video has ignited a longstanding debate within the partner communities of Microsoft and VMware over which company has the better approach to virtualization. In Microsoft's view, virtualization is a feature of the operating system, while VMware represents an unnecessary -- and expensive -- extra layer. VMWare counters that Microsoft's virtualization isn't sophisticated enough for the needs of enterprises.
What's especially galling for VMware is that the video incident allows Microsoft to play the victim role at a time when its confidence in the virtualization market is reaching unprecedented heights. The economic situation is already playing into Microsoft's hands by compelling companies to get more out of existing infrastructure investments.
Microsoft says the virtualization improvements it has made in Windows Server 2008 R2, slated for launch this fall, are a real threat for VMware. Unfortunately for VMware, it now appears to be desperately trying to stave off the challenge -- even at the cost of violating the principle of responsible disclosure.