I just read an article on infoworld.com titled “Microsoft grooms Virtual Server to be a true VMware challenger” by Oliver Rist. Granted the article was from December 08, 2005, but man is Oliver smoking some serious stuff.

The article opens up with “Virtual Server 2005 is the only thing out of Redmond that might make us stray from VMware”… It goes on to say “Microsoft isn’t kidding around, incorporating what it sees as the best of its competitors’ features with the power it has over the OS”.

First off, VMware is light years ahead of MS in the virtualization arena. Take management of your Virtual Machines for instance. VMware just released the 2nd generation of their Virtual Center product and with it 3 amazing new add-on products (HA, DRS/Clustering, and Consolidated Backup) and huge advancements to 2 of their already industry leading products (VMotion & VMFS). Microsoft on the other hand is only now preparing to release their beta program for “Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager” (say that 3 times fast). In fact, Microsoft’s FAQ page for this product does little to talk about what features it will have: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/systemcenter/scvmm/evaluation/faq.mspx.

Secondly let’s re-read part of that last quote again: “incorporating what it sees as the best of its competitors’ features with the power it has over the OS”. Basically what he appears to be saying is: Microsoft is going to steal technology from VMware and then use their strangle hold over the Intel OS market to unfairly squeeze VMware out of existence like they did to Netscape.

The on thing that Mr Rist fails to mention is the fact that Windows is not optimized to server out system resources in nearly an efficient manner as VMware. The VMkernel in ESX3 manages all the hardware. (The service console now sits as a VM on top of it.) It’s optimized to do nothing more than virtualize hardware and manage resources. Windows on the other hand, doesn’t even manage resources that well for itself, much less for other OS’s.

I think Mr Rist needs to either rethink whether MS is really competing with VMware.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/12/08/50OPenterwin_1.html