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Microsoft found in state of virtualization denial
In the world according to Microsoft, mature technologies are defined as those for which Microsoft is shipping products. Any other technology is by definition immature.
If you keep that thought in the back of your head, this interview with Mike Neil, Microsoft's general manager for virtualization, becomes hilarious.
His core points: Microsoft isn't behind VMware because server virtualization is still a developing market and confined to (unnamed) niche markets. Only Microsoft can give virtualization an appeal to a "wider swath of the industry".
The brief answer: just look at VMware's $20bn market capitalization and the $500m Xensource acquisition by Citrix. Investors don’t seems to consider this a "developing" market.
Next point: Users don’t need advanced technologies like live migration of workloads, which are supported by VMware and XenSource, but that Microsoft's upcoming "Viridian" product will lack. "It is a sexy feature and sounds really exciting," but customers don't use it and don't ask for it.
The brief answer: customers are asking for it, and rely on this technology for their "Walhalla" data center scenarios. It's just that the management software for moving around these virtual workloads is still very immature. But even if firms don't deploy it, it will be a checkbox item.
Microsoft as usual is contradicting itself to crawl out of its self-dug hole. When the company first delayed Viridian, it claimed that providing support for 32 cores was key, when developers said that they were incapable of building the software on time, they went back to 16 cores and claimed that anything beyond that was merely a sexy feature.
In the world according to Microsoft, mature technologies are defined as those for which Microsoft is shipping products. Any other technology is by definition immature.
Just pretending to hang out with the big boys
August 22, 2007 at 08:59 PM | Permalink
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