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Microsoft Providing Virtual Server Free
liliafan writes "In an effort to gain a market majority over VMware Microsoft announced it is giving Virtual Server away for free, additionally they will provide customer support for Linux. In a related move VMware have opened their partition file format to the community, aggressive and suprising moves in the virtualisation market."
It's the "supporting Linux" part that gives me the giggles. Believe anything out of a Microsoft mouth on the subject of Linux? The giggles are getting uncontrollable.
They may not be in trouble, but they're definitely having to do things they'd very much rather not do.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
I've been studying these technologies for a while now. It's only recently that processor power has reached the point that an x86 powered computer had the processor performance to overcome the inherent design limitation historically imposed by design decisions made by IBM and subsequently Microsoft and Intel that can make use of all the power available in the processors themselves. For a multitude of reasons (off topic) this power is irrelevant to most home users and business users of pcs. More importantly this power is irrelevant to the majority of server purposes. It's well known that most servers used in business are running at much less than 20% utilization levels. And that's with old boxes. This means that buying a new server with current technology results in a box running at levels as low as 5 or 10% utilization. Why bother? Enter virtualization. With virtualization a single box can replace 4, 7 16, 20 or more servers. Not that good for IntelDellIBMHP etc, but great for you and me. Less electricity needed, less cables, less everything. The only factor holding this back is licensing costs. If you can reduce those costs too, wow. Microsoft allows a single $4K Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition license to support up to four instances. If you don't have to pay extra for virtualization software, then the price starts to be very competitive with supported Linux licensing. More importantly it makes virtualization a standard way of doing things. The real question is what happens to the open source community when the development of free tools like Xen loose their support fee value when competing with a more mature platform that costs the same thing. We're not there yet, but it will happen. In a year or three.
Virtualization is the future and helps us get to that goal of utility computing. Its not too surprising that Microsoft has done this, nor was this the first drop in price for their server virtualization product.
What is surprising is Microsoft lagging behind VMWare big time when it comes to server virtualization. When I spoke to a VMWare sales rep, he said the money comes from ESX (which costs $3750 a pop), not GSX or the workstation products. People buy ESX because they want the following (I know this because the company I work for evaluated the different VM products):
-Faster VM performance
-Support (anyone that works in a datacenter will tell you that support is always necessary)
-Features (virtual center, virtual SMP, vmotion)
No other product stands up to ESX when it comes to the datacenter environment, and thats the market Microsoft needs to go after. The midrange virtualization products like GSX or virtual server are used for developer testing or in QA, but not for running production services (at least not in the big environments). This move by Microsoft won't make much of a dent in VMWare's share (at least where the money is) so its not a huge step.
I love ESX, and one thing that I hope will make ESX better is Microsoft putting pressure on VMWare to not get too comfy and to constantly innovate because the company's future depends on it. I just hope it doesn't have the same outcome as IE vs NS.