You've heard me pontificate before on what I see as the impending commoditization of hypervisors across all vendors. VMware's first-mover advantage gained them a number of years of hyper-profit before second-movers like Citrix and Microsoft began making their way into the market. The most impending movement about to occur is Microsoft's dropping of Hyper-V into the playing field for the low cost of $28.

(Actually, one could argue that their cost for the hypervisor is effectively "free", since the regular editions of Windows Server 2008 include it. The "w/o Hyper-V" editions are technically priced at around $28 less)

Chris Wolf continues down this line of thinking with an article and accompanying video over at SearchServerVirtualization.com where he develops an even stronger argument. He writes:

In the near term, I expect all vendors, including VMware, to offer free versions of their hypervisors. If you think hell will freeze over before VMware offers a free version of ESX Server, think again. Sure, there isn't a hypervisor today that matches ESX feature for feature, but the alternatives don't have to. In many cases, a hypervisor that is just "good enough" for a particular task and less expensive will win out, especially for less-critical workloads. Whether they want to admit it publicly or not, all hypervisor vendors realize that developing best-in-class management is key to winning the hypervisor war. Indeed, regardless of their unique intrinsic value, hypervisors are becoming commoditized.

But there's more to this argument than just seeing into the future. Chris continues his discussion with a very important suggestion to organizations considering a move to virtualization: Prepare financially for the change. If the price of hypervisors is due to decrease, then you and your organization shouldn't consider full cost as an option for software purchase. Chris continues:

With hypervisor prices expected to drop, don't lock your organization into a lengthy licensing deal. What could look like a steal today could easily be viewed as a ripoff in a few months. By 2009 several major vendors will ship enterprise-ready hypervisors; locking yourself into a licensing contract beyond 2009 will likely result in a lost opportunity for significant savings.

Chris suggests that discounts of 20% to 50% on today's hypervisor purchases - especially large purchases with with long-term committments - shouldn't be considered inappropriate. If you're about to lock-in to a virtualization platform in the near term, you don't want to be caught holding the bag with an expensive solution that others paid pennies on the dollar because they waited.

Or, alternatively, consider waiting for Microsoft's solution to arrive in the next few months. Even Microsoft doesn't consider Hyper-V to be the highest-end solution for all workloads. But it does position the product as a lesser-cost solutionf for 2nd and 3rd tier servers with lower expectations of uptime (think WSUS servers, SCCM servers, other infrastructure servers that can afford to go down from time to time).

Ultimately, the moral here is: Be smart with any virtualization platform purchases over the next 12-24 months.