Microsoft Slips even Further in the Virtualization Game
This is HUGE news.
I read this this morning on Alessandro Perilli's Virtualization.info blog. It appears that Microsoft has removed a few more of the interesting features from their Viridian release of Microsoft Virtual Server:
No live migration (gs: VMotion equivalent?)No hot-add resources (storage, networking, memory, processor)
Limit support to 16 cores/logical processors
This is huge, because as Alessandro says...
"On a side now that codename Viridian has been deprived of all its key features, will be much harder to justify its release in mid 2008......As I wrote one year ago on the Microsoft, the big absentee of virtualization essay, software giant is limiting its effort in virtualization space releasing just a minor update every 1-1,5 years. And now that hardware virtualization is becoming a mainstream technology and mass amount of companies started recognizing its benefits, this pace is no more acceptable.
This last change in release plans further damaged company credibility, most of all if we consider Microsoft is doing same errors in the application virtualization space: despite the smart acquisition of Softricity one year ago, Redmond software giant did almost nothing to push SoftGrid technology to customers, or to seriously integrate the product in its offering."
I've been pushing VMware (and occasionally Virtuozzo) now for a while since I had a suspicion that Microsoft would continue to drop the ball on their product. This is especially revealing after the announcement three weeks ago that the next version of Virtual Server would be delayed.
Its the "no live migration" that really interests me. If I'm reading "live migration" right, that means there will be no VMotion-equivalent in Microsoft's product for the foreseeable future. Its the VMotion capability that took VMware's product out of the test/dev labs and into the production ones. In my consulting practice, I can't sell virtualization without live/hot migration. No one wants it -- at least for production uses.
So, what are your thoughts? Does this signal that VMware will continue to remain the industry leader? Or, is it a signal that Microsoft may not be getting into the virtualization space after all?
You can read the blog post at virtualization.info at:
http://www.virtualization.info/2007/05/microsoft-removes-viridian-key-features.html
The full announcement from Microsoft is available at:
http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2007/05/10/viridian-features-update-beta-planned-for-longhorn-rtm.aspx
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