Microsoft's Virtualization Big Picture: Worth the Wait?

CIO —

Despite naysaying by analysts, customers, tech industry observers and me, it is not true that Microsoft has no substantive answer to the multifaceted approach VMware and other competitors take to server virtualization.

Microsoft has a very good answer, in fact, one that's more open and complete than is typical of Microsoft—the company that only decided a couple of years ago that it was undiplomatic to continue referring to server implementations that included applications or operating systems from other companies as "alien environments."

Its answer includes sophisticated virtual- and physical machine management, disaster recovery, automatic provisioning and several different flavors of desktop virtualization.

Unfortunately, most of the content in that answer is a little, well, premature. Three to six months premature, depending on which part of the answer you're waiting to hear.

If you only want a dirt-cheap way to run virtual machines on your Windows Server 2008 machines—or even non-Microsoft-based servers if you use the standalone version of Microsoft's hypervisor—you'll get what you're waiting for sometime this summer, when Hyper-V completes beta testing.

You can get a beta version, of course, and it's not the only hypervisor option out there. But since so many data-center managers refuse to count on a Version 1.0 product, I'm assuming they won't count on one whose version number is still on the wrong side of the decimal point.

Hyper-V can run underneath an operating system on a server, very close to BIOS, and support non-Microsoft operating systems, especially Linux, according to Zane Adam, senior director of virtualization at Microsoft.

The more comprehensive piece is the management suite Microsoft is building out of its Systems Center systems-management application. It centers around Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), a completely new module in the suite custom-designed to add detailed VM management to Systems Center, which also includes backup-and-recovery and automatic failover for physical machines, as well as configuration and provisioning of physical and virtual machines.

Systems Center, with VMM installed, will seamlessly manage physical and virtual servers, physical and virtual desktops, and applications through the same interface, according to Microsoft.

Version 2 of VMM—a release date for which has not been set—will also manage VMware servers.

If you're thinking Systems Center isn't synonymous with centralized enterprise-class data-center systems management, by the way, you're right. Adam says Microsoft has been pushing the suite steadily uphill for the last several years, updating it from incarnations as Systems Management Server and Microsoft Operations Manager into a more cohesive product set.

But the core of the high-end systems management market still belongs to HP, IBM/Tivoli and others, not Microsoft and its suite, which started life as a software-distribution suite designed to help customers distribute Windows 95.

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