Today, at Teched North America in New Orleans, I attended a breakout session where Microsoft compared their Virtualization to VMware. Jason Fulencheck, from Microsoft, quoted a late 2009 Gartner survey where they polled CIO’s and IT managers about server virtualization. The results were very interesting: 40% of the participants responded that they would adopt a multi-vendor strategy for their server virtualization. Two out of three of these people would likely adopt Microsoft & VMware as vendors.

Why Microsoft?

Jason started to explain why you should/could use Microsoft Virtualization? He had four big points to that. Fr one: it’s the platform you know. Hyper-V and server virtualization today is a key feature of platform and you can use the tools you know. Secondly, Microsoft has a full Cloud to Datacenter to Desktop strategy. They provide a full range of productions and solutions and more importantly, a large partner eco-system. Third, they provide complete management and integrated management with their System Center suite. Microsoft supports both physical and virtual environments and supports cross-hypervisor. Fourth and last, it provides the best TCO/ROI. It has lower costs upfront and has easier integration with existing systems. But more important, it has lower ongoing costs.

Management matters

Jason continued that the key to virtualization is not the VMs but the applications that run in the virtual machines. Applications are what the end-users see. Microsoft provides integrated management for virtualization from existing tools, like System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Their management offerings focus on applications, the workloads on virtual machines. You can manage, monitor virtual machines just like physical machines, with System Center Operations Manager.

Datacenter evolution

Jason showed a slide on the datacenter evolution. From a historic perspective, companies started off with a traditional datacenter. A well-know, stable and secure solution, but on average 15% utilization on resources. This evolved to a virtualized datacenter; utilization increased to over 50% and the management costs decreased. Today, companies are looking to implement private clouds. Management costs even decrease more, and IT is provided as a service. In the near future, the datacenter will evolve to embrace public cloud. Capacity can be requested on demand and companies can use the global reach of the public cloud.

Costs comparison

Jason pulled up a slide that compared Enterprise vSphere versus Windows Server 2008 R2 with server management suite datacenter for management. It showed five colums where the message mainly was that Microsoft is on-par with VMware on most features. However, the fifth column, on management of the hypervisors, showed that Microsoft has a very comprehensive management solution. As stated in the previous paragraph: for instance, in-guest monitoring, physical management, etcetera. Looking at the costs summary, Microsoft was on average 4-5 times cheaper.

Important: Jason quicly noted that Windows Server 2008 R2 service pack 1 will introduce the capability to “hot add memory” to Virtual Machines!

Free Hypervisor comparison

So how do ESXi v3 and v4 compare to Hyper-V Server 2008 R2? Jason pulled up a slide that had one interesting point: the free VMware hypervisor does not support high availability, while the free Microsoft hypervisor does support Live Migration (delivered by failover clustering)!

Note: most of us already know that service pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 will deliver on Dynamic Memory, allowing for advanced memory scenario’s on the hypervisor. More information can be found here: http://bink.nu/news/hyper-v-dynamic-memory.aspx

Partners in virtualization

Jason continued to emphasize that Microsoft provides the most comprehensive virtualization solution. Not only server virtualization but also application-, desktop- and presentation virtualization. He showed that Citrix, a partner in virtualization, can extend these scenario’s with even more. For instance, with their Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V product, they offer features like Lab Management and Site Recovery with Microsoft Hyper-V.

Conclusion

Jason ended with Crutchfield. A company that adopted Hyper-V and System Center. Their IT personnel came up stage to share their succes story. The message: Hyper-V is enterprise ready and System Center provided easy and integrated management, at a significant costs saving.