Peter Bruzzese over at InfoWorld interviewed me recently to talk about the differences between Microsoft's now-released Hyper-V and the long-standing ESX virtualization product from VMware. I'm an unabashed fan of Hyper-V from the perspective of economics, so my thoughts on each product's TCO are exposed in this article.

Specifically, Peter asked Microsoft's group product manager Patrick O'Rourke as well as myself to respond to a comment from Sun's Senior Director of xVM Vijay Sarathy. One of those responses I find particularly interesting:

Hyper-V only addresses Windows-based servers despite the fact that most datacenters are incredibly heterogeneous and require support for more than just Windows workloads. Aren't you underestimating the complexity and diversity of your customers' datacenters?

O'Rourke: No we're not. Our customers make sure we know their datacenter needs and provide us input on how we can help. So far they're telling us Windows Server 2008 has been a big help. As for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, it allows customers to consolidate applications running Novell SLES 10. As for Red Hat, Microsoft and Red Hat both realize the importance of virtualization and interoperability needs of our joint customers, and we are actively discussing how to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

Shields: Hyper-V doesn't address only Windows-based VMs. It supports SLES as well. Microsoft's support for additional Linux OSes is muted because Microsoft hasn't seen the demand for it. They're demanding a rock-stable virtualization platform that supports some of their workloads. Why do a poor job being all things to everyone when you can do a great job fixing a specific market segment?

Going along this road further, SCVMM [System Center Virtual Machine Manager] includes support for managing the Xens and ESXs of the world. Let those virtualization platforms do the oddball OS virtualizing, and let Microsoft handle its own product stable.

Although I was later corrected in the comments that SCVMM will not support Xen with this release, I find it interesting that large numbers of people still see heterogeneity as a major factor in deciding on a virtualization platform. And yet, the vast majority of virtualized environments are mostly homogeneous (and I'm not just saying Windows here).

Let me ask you the question: For the servers you plan to virtualize or have already virtualized, what percentage of each OS are they made up of? Mostly Microsoft? Mostly Linux? Or, evenly distributed?