It's game time for Microsoft in virtualization, revealed Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference 2008 in Houston, Texas on June 10, 2008. The CEO's focus is intimately connected with the release to manufacturing of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and the start of the hypervisor's distribution as automatic updates for the latest Windows Server platform.
Microsoft has already announced that it aims to bring virtualization out of its niche. Despite being a
technology which has been around for decades, virtualization has never made it into the mainstream. This is a task that the Redmond company has taken onto itself, and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is, in this regard, the first stage on making virtualization ubiquitous.
"It's game time for us in virtualization," Ballmer commented. "I'm sure we've got a number of people here who are also fantastic partners of our competitors, but if you believe, as I do, that it's time to democratize virtualization, to make it affordable not just on three, four, or five percent of servers, but really to be able to virtualize the entire world, Hyper-V is here. The System Center Virtual Machine Manager is here, let's get after it and let's show the world how to bring the benefits of virtualization to the other 95 percent of servers."
Kevin Turner, chief operating officer, Microsoft, indicated that the Redmond giant is going to smash hard into the virtualization market in order to displace rival VMware. One aspect which will guarantee Microsoft's success while going against VMware, already a virtualization powerhouse, is price. "Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to be about two-thirds the price cheaper than VMware in the marketplace. We're going to have a cross-platform solution. So when a customer already owns VMware, our management solution is going to allow that customer to manage their VMware investment, and the Microsoft investment," he stated.
Microsoft has an immense space to grow into on the virtualization market. Simon Witts, corporate vice president, Enterprise Partner Group informed that, according to IDC, less than 10% of the servers deployed today are hosts for virtualization. At the same time, only 1% of all Windows Vista desktops have been virtualized. Microsoft aims to change all this.
"With Hyper-V and the release that we've done with Windows Server 2008, and where we're going, we are going to have a ton of fun, ladies and gentlemen, competing in that virtualization space and getting after it in a big, big way," Turner stated.
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