Microsoft's Hyper-V Server - Ritalin Needed?

On Monday Microsoft made a few interesting announcements at the TechEd IT Forum in Barcelona. Most notably, in my opinion, was the Microsoft Hyper-V announcement. Hyper-V is the new name for the Windows Server 2008 Virtualization Service, formerly code-named Viridian. While a name change to Hyper-V is not a big deal, the announced stand-alone Hyper-V hypervisor is. I was one of the thousands who witnessed Microsoft's and Novell's virtualization strategy at the Novell BrainShare conference in March 2007. At BrainShare, both vendors made it clear that they felt the hypervisor belonged in the OS, and not as a separate stand-alone entity. VMware's Raghu Raghuram commented to John Fontana of Network World that "Their product architecture is that virtualization is part of the [operating system] so they seem to be rethinking what hypervisor should be." Essentially, he's saying that Microsoft may have a case of Attention Deficit Disorder. Why take a stance that the hypervisor should be part of the OS and then offer the hypervisor as a stand-alone entity?

The answer to that question is clear - Microsoft is listening to their customers. Customers want a choice, and in shipping Hyper-V as a stand-alone hypervisor, Microsoft is giving them that choice. Also, a stand-alone hypervisor opens additional deployment and management opportunities. Simon Crosby has made no secret of the fact that Citrix XenSource management platforms will fully support the Hyper-V (Viridian) hypervisor. So if customers want Hyper-V, they can drop it right in to their existing XenSource infrastructure without missing a beat. In addition to broadening Hyper-V's management compatibility, Microsoft's announcement of a stand-alone hypervisor paves the way for Microsoft to announce an embedded version of Hyper-V that ships in flash memory on server metal. Back in September, I predicted  that Microsoft would eventually offer an embedded hypervisor – and mentioned it again at VMworld. While some analysts found the prediction amusing, no one is laughing now. With a stand-alone hypervisor, little stands between Microsoft and embedded hypervisor agreements with the IHV community.

I'm sure Microsoft's newly announced hypervisor strategy will get spun in plenty of ways, but the bottom line is that at the end of the day we have more choices. We have more choices to align a technology with a particular project's requirements. Finding the right technology for the right solution is what matters most. So I'm not going to criticize Microsoft for offering a product model that has been successful for VMware for years. Instead, I'm going to applaud their new direction - Ritalin inspired or not!

Posted by: Chris Wolf