Who has the better virtualization platform – VMware or Microsoft?
VMware is the kingpin of virtualization, but the game is changing fast and Microsoft MCTS Training is baking the technology into the very core of many products. Which company has the best approach?
Moderator
[Jon Dix]
John Dix, Network World Editor in Chief, sets up the debates and recruits the experts. Contact him with thoughts and ideas, jdix@nww.com.
The experts
Bogomil Balkansky, Vice president of product marketing, Virtualization and Cloud Platform at VMware,
says vSphere wins because of the company’s big head start, large installed base and track record of innovation.
David Greschler, Director of virtualization strategy, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft,
says Microsoft wins because virtualized environments will ultimately span data center and cloud platforms and the company’s management framework, identity service and development environment can best span this heterogeneous environment.
A big head start matters
By Bogomil Balkansky, Vice president of product marketing, Virtualization and Cloud Platform at VMware
IT is being served by a combination of vendors, some of whom are working to provide a clear path forward, and others that are struggling to hold on to the past. VMware vSphere represents the architecture, expertise and ecosystem driving a new approach for IT, enabled by virtualization and broadly recognized as cloud computing.
VSphere capabilities have expanded to optimize not only servers, but storage and network, improving quality of service, increasing IT agility and recasting the economic model of computing.
Since pioneering x86 virtualization more than a decade ago, VMware has established a steady track record of industry firsts, continually advancing the transformative capabilities of virtualization through our flagship platform, VMware vSphere: first live migration, first integrated network distributed switch, first VM fault tolerance capabilities – the list goes on.
Microsoft vs. VMware: Who’s better at disaster recovery?
Over the years, this innovation has increased the role virtualization plays in delivering profound value for enterprises. VSphere capabilities have expanded to optimize not only servers, but storage and network, improving quality of service, increasing IT agility and recasting the economic model of computing.
But the transformation in the market is not just about product capabilities. In fact, the value of virtualization cannot be measured through any single, silver bullet feature. Rather, the central role virtualization now plays has elevated this debate well beyond the level of feature functionality. Customers are looking for a complete, proven platform that can meet the stringent needs of today while providing an evolutionary path to the future. There is only one solution that meets these criteria: vSphere.
VSphere is inarguably the most proven solution in the market. More than 190,000 customers trust VMware virtualization. A global ecosystem of service providers (currently more than 1,700) are building their public cloud services on vSphere. In the past two years alone, VMware has tripled the number of customers from the small and midsize business segment – a market that the competition is counting on, but is losing.
We also provide the most combined server, storage, networking, applications and operating systems support with more than 1,300 technology partners. Our innovation is matched by our commitment to quality – with our data center customers reporting 98% product satisfaction, and nine out of 10 deploying most or all new servers as VMware virtual machines by default.
This support has been echoed across the industry. The Wall Street Journal presented VMware vSphere the 2009 Technology Innovation Award among all software products. Even conference attendees at Microsoft’s own TechEd 2010 voted VMware vSphere as the Best of TechEd “Attendees’ Pick.”
But the best platform also needs to be cost-effective, and customers know that upfront license costs do not tell the whole story. A more holistic view of total cost, or “cost-per-application,” includes virtualization and management software, operating system, hardware, electricity and data center space costs across all virtualized applications.
VMware delivers up to 30% lower cost-per-application than so-called “free” products. VMware vSphere editions for SMBs start as low as $83 per processor, giving organizations of all sizes access to the same proven technology used by the world’s largest enterprises. VMware also enables lower ongoing administrative costs by automating manually intensive tasks. Customers report an average 30% reduction in time spent on routine administration and a 25% or more reduction in overall operational costs.
While we’re proud of the long, consistent track record of results, the future of vSphere is even more exciting. VSphere enables enterprise customers to utilize existing assets and take an evolutionary path to cloud computing and future end-user computing models by playing a pivotal role as the platform for private cloud computing within the data center as well as for public cloud offerings at global service providers.
VSphere also serves as the foundation for a new end-user computing architecture enabling customers to modernize decades-old desktop computing models to better meet the needs of IT and the changing state of user computing. And, as new application development increasingly takes advantage of cloud computing models, vSphere is once again the center of our customers’ strategy.
This vision for the future is unique from alternative approaches that lack VMware’s commitment to openness, application mobility and service provider choice.
VSphere is the industry’s most proven, complete, cost-effective virtualization platform. This is true not only because it continues to set the bar as the most advanced solution technologically, but because it has been chosen by enterprises, service providers and a broad ecosystem of partners as the foundation upon which the next generation of IT will be built.
VMware, the global leader in cloud infrastructure, delivers customer-proven virtualization solutions that significantly reduce IT complexity, energizing business, while saving energy — financial human and the Earth’s.
Balkansky is vice president of product marketing, for VMware’s Virtualization and Cloud Platforms.
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The destination has changed
By David Greschler, Director of virtualization strategy, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft
If you think VMware is the winner of this conversation, I’d ask you to think again. IT leaders care about deploying a platform that is reliable, stable, cost-effective and easily adapts to changing business needs. A few years ago virtualization was seen as the final destination. Now it is clear this technology is a stepping stone to the more agile, responsive world of cloud computing.
I’m suggesting when you evaluate a virtualization platform, one of the most important characteristics you need to consider is how easy it will be to integrate the platform with the cloud.
The core benefits of virtualization – the ability to consolidate servers, quickly provision new applications, automatically backup system – pales in comparison to the speed and cost savings possible with cloud computing.
Microsoft vs. VMware: Who’s better at disaster recovery?
Am I suggesting that you abandon virtualization and move to the cloud? No, make the transition on your terms. There are situations where you’ll want to keep applications within your data center. However, I’m suggesting when you evaluate a virtualization platform, one of the most important characteristics you need to consider is how easy it will be to integrate the platform with the cloud.
Is there a common management framework so you can manage your on-premises and cloud applications? Is there a single identity service that spans both? Does your existing development environment and applications run in both locations?
VMware today offers a virtualization platform that only works within virtualized data centers. Microsoft has built a public cloud platform, Windows Azure, that runs on multiple data centers across the world. We have a worldwide network of service provider partners who can help you move to a cloud model. As a result, we uniquely offer common application development, management and identity across the virtualized data center, a private cloud environment and the public cloud.
For example, Lionbridge built a private cloud lab using Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, System Center and our self-service portal toolkit to enable 4,200 employees and independent workers worldwide to collaborate. The private cloud, which on average runs 400 virtual machines and at peak times up to 700 VMs, lets the company centralize IT management, simplify user processes, improve customer service and improve resource tracking. Lionbridge has one model for applications, identity and management.
Today Microsoft MCITP Certification and its partners offer all the capabilities you need to deploy key virtualization scenarios, such as business continuity, desktop virtualization (VDI), server consolidation and private cloud. For example, Continental Airlines expects to save $1.5 million annually using our infrastructure and platform technologies for server consolidation and VDI. As of a year ago, it consolidated more than 125 servers and now runs more than 320 virtual machines.
And Continental isn’t flying alone. Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center have everything a customer needs for enterprise-wide data center deployments. This year Fortune 500 companies CH2M Hill and Union Pacific swapped VMware for Microsoft. They aren’t the first to switch, and they’re joined by many more organizations that have opted to use Hyper-V alongside VMware. That’s easy because Microsoft System Center allows you to manage multiple hypervisor environments and the applications running within the virtual machines.
There was a perception among early adopters of server virtualization that Microsoft didn’t have a rich feature set. That’s not the case. More than a year ago we further simplified and expanded clustering nodes, and added live migration for zero-downtime migrations of virtual machines between Hyper-V servers.
Hyper-V also provides high availability with transparent and automatic failover of virtual machines. With service pack 1 of Windows Server 2008 R2, we’re adding Dynamic Memory and a new high-fidelity remote desktop protocol.
Lastly, you should read Enterprise Strategy Group’s lab results that show Hyper-V performance versus physical devices, with 95% to 99% of the performance of physical disks, and 89% to 98% of performance of the tested workloads compared to what can be achieved on physical machines.
At Microsoft we believe virtualization is so critical we’ve made it part of our server OS, our management tools and our cloud strategy. As a result, VMware is missing critical features: the ability to manage both physical and virtual machines; the ability to get information about the application running within the virtual machine located on-premises or cloud; the ability to manage virtual machines from Microsoft, VMware and soon Citrix.
That’s probably the most glaring difference between the two companies: VMware is a virtualization company, and Microsoft is a platform company.
As a platform company, one of our goals is for you to easily and cost-effectively evolve to new computing models as innovation moves the industry forward. By putting virtualization into our platform we have made it easier for you to adopt cloud computing without major disruption or change in infrastructure.
For example, we built Windows Azure so you can take existing or new applications — be it .Net, Java, Ruby, PHP — and port most of them to a large-scale cloud platform. We’ve also made it clear you’ll be able to move virtualized workloads to Windows Azure.
That means Microsoft will let you run all your applications – new, ported and virtualized – across traditional datacenters, private and public clouds. This capability is part of our strategy that’s focused on delivering one application model, one identity model, and one management model across all computing environments.
Founded in 1975, Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
Greschler is director of virtualization strategy, Server and Tools Business
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Who has the better virtualization platform?
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The Novell of virtualization?
By Guy Chapman (not verified) on Mon, 08/09/2010 – 11:53am.
I think VMware is currently well positioned to become the Novell of virtualization. Consider the similarities: technical superiority, “career-safe” choice, large vested corporate user base, complex pricing models, arbitrary prioce increases in a captive market, Microsoft buying market share with free and nearly-free product.
VMware has far and away the best management interface. Right now it also probably has the best hypervisor. But the future is in cloud, and increasingly IT departments will be agnostic about hypervisors and using web service driven integration tools to managed a technically and geographically diverse infrastructure.
VMware has ridden the wave of enterprise virtualisation, but I think that wave is crashing on the beach. Following it is a much bigger and more disruptive wave – a virtual tsunami – of service-driven cloud-like infrastructure. It’s far from clear who will ride this wave best. You can never discount Microsoft but the open source community has some compelling products in this space right now.
The Novell of Virtulization? Not any time soon….
By David Owen (not verified) on Mon, 08/09/2010 – 6:13pm.
If VMware do go the way of Novell I think you are looking at a good decade before you even start seeing the signs. They are several steps ahead all the time and seem to be able to maintain those steps.
It’s interesting you reference the pricing models. Perhaps Microsoft is significantly cheaper at the very very small SME however once you get to enterprise (where most of the money is to be made) you will not find a significant difference.
I think it is far too early in the day to imagine which companies will do best within the cloud services department but VMware (as well as Microsoft) are well aware of this and are positioning them selves with this firmly in mind. It would be naive to think VMware will simply shrink because everyone has adopted cloud.
I would love to know what evidence you have for VMware “crashing on the beach”…. they are by far and away the market leader and that % doesn’t seem to be wavering much. You only have to look at this pole to see that (and VMwares recent profit margins).
If anything I think the biggest threat is the opensource community. However you will need to ask yourself, Will big enterprise adopt opensource in a large enough manor to be able to mount a serious challenge?
There are no guarantees of course but if you are asking me, I think VMware will be the market leader for a very long time to come.
Microsoft HyperV For Me
By Alan Richards (not verified) on Mon, 08/09/2010 – 2:30pm.
As a School IT manager that’s just virualised our whole environment it has to be Microsoft. It fulfills everything we need from virtualisation at no cost to us.
As a School we already licence Windows under the Schools agreement and therefore we are licensed for HyperV. We did look at VMWare but it is so expensive for Schools and all it’s extra features aren’t worth the expense.
Hyper-V will turn a product into a feature
By Anon (not verified) on Mon, 08/09/2010 – 2:37pm.
with the commoditization of server virtualization, Hyper-V will eventually change the VMware ESX tool into a check box feature needed in the OS and loss of ability to charge for it.
Novell of Virtualization IF Microsoft can meet VMware Features
By Andy Kitzke (not verified) on Mon, 08/09/2010 – 3:10pm.
I agree with Guy Chapman on VMware possibly walking down that path only if Microsoft can catch them on features. Right now VMware still keeps creating new features Hyper-V doesn’t have and won’t for a year or two until their engineers catch up.
Have you used Hyper-V?
By Anon (not verified) on Mon, 08/09/2010 – 3:26pm.
Anyone who has used both will know that VMWare is way ahead of Microsoft. Although I do believe that Microsoft is forcing the hypervisor into a commodity which benefits users of both products.
XenServer
By Anon (not verified) on Mon, 08/09/2010 – 3:47pm.
VMware is too expensive for us. Their three server package was a great idea until we needed to go to 5 servers.
So while we ran VMware for many moons, and loved the jump to ESXi 4, we moved on. Since we don’t overcommit, and we don’t buy any more MS than we have to, XenServer fits the bill perfectly (again, for us).
Been running 8 boxes for over a year now with no issues, easy to admin, and easily survived both a XenServer host failure (motherboard) and a NAS hardware failure.
We paid the $1k/server to license HA recently, and now life is even better. Price-wise, VMware couldn’t touch our setup if they wanted to. 8 servers with 2x CPUs, and a common admin console.
VMware has a killer desktop product. But on the server end, we’re not buying the Cadillac when we have the speedy and reliable Honda.
If we could AFFORD the Cadillac, we’d be in there. But VMware is still too pricetag greedy for a less than large-scale company.
Again, YMMV.
Agree with every word.
By Anon (not verified) on Mon, 08/09/2010 – 4:11pm.
Agree with every word. vSphere is good and reliable virtualization platform but that’s it. HyperV have a lot more on the plate and it integrated into Windows Server that far less picky about hardware and cost is NOTHING….
VMware is indeed Novell of virtualization – once famous then forgotten
Why Only Two?
By Robin Jackson (not verified) on Mon, 08/09/2010 – 4:14pm.
There are far more mature products than Hyper-V which give VMWare a better run for their money. VirtualBox and Xen both come to mind (Oracle/Sun and Citrix respectively).
The real winner will be the one that its VM and architecture agnostic.
What do I mean by that?
I mean that the VM format and where it is deployed is of no consequence.
IMHO actually Novell is way ahead of the pack with their vision of being able to provision between the “private cloud” (aka Virtual Hosts) and the “public cloud.”
Novell has invested heavily in brains that understand the standards, how to crack the different formats apart, put them back together again and move them on the fly.
Is it any wonder that VMWare and Novell have partnered recently?
And why is everyone forgetting the fact that Novell and Microsoft have had an Interoperability agreement for years that enabled Novell (with its Orchestrator product) to to a hot move of a Hyper-V machine before Microsoft could.
You’re asking the WRONG questions IMHO.
