Microsoft did a webcast on March 1st aimed at VMware administrators/engineers/consultants who are interested in, or will be working with Hyper-V.
The fan-boys will be thinking negative thoughts and wishing me ill will now 🙂
Realistically, you need to start thinking of hardware virtualisation as being like hardware. Some companies like HP, some like Dell, and some like Fujitsu – who really likes IBM? I’m kidding; I don’t really care who likes IBM hardware.
This means that although a company may have a preference, they will have variations depending on circumstances. For example, we’re told that VMware has a presence in every single Fortune 100 in the USA. But do you think none of them are either using or considering Hyper-V as well? There may be features that ESX offers that they use, but Hyper-V offers virtualisation at a greater price. Bundle in System Center and you have a complete management solution rather than a point one. With VMM you can manage both ESX (and ESXi) and Hyper-V. Only the biggest of fan-boys will rule out Hyper-V making it’s way into some VMware sites to work along side it, just like you find a mix of server vendor types in some computer rooms.
The services industry is another interesting one. This time last year, I could really think of one, maybe two, services companies in Ireland that I would call if I was in need of Hyper-V consulting skills. Lots of them went to events, but they were all sticking to their VMware guns. It was probably a combination of internal evaluations and customer decision making that drove this. But since last Summer, things shifted slightly. Hyper-V is mentioned more as a skills requirement. And thanks to the HP/Microsoft virtualisation alliance, HP resellers are starting to gather skills. One of the major players in the Irish enterprise hardware space was laughing at Hyper-V a year ago. Then they started to lose big virtualisation bids to the few companies going in with Hyper-V solutions. CSV and Live Migration changed everything. Customers now were happy to get the core features at a fraction of the price.
If you are a VMware person, give the webcast a watch. Most of the criticisms of Hyper-V by fan-boys are usually based on lack of knowledge, e.g. the famous “9 things” post that was widely slammed for being ill-informed.