Microsoft Goes for VMware’s Jugular with VMlimited Comparison

It’s not like Microsoft has been holding back punches in the face-off with VMware, but the Redmond company has just upped the ante with a new campaign designed to highlight the advantages of Cloud technologies over virtualization solutions.

The software giant’s VMlimited site and video are direct jabs at VMware, and the content pretty much speaks for itself.

Funny marketing video aside, Microsoft goes for VMware’s jugular, stressing that customers overpay for virtualization offerings when they could buy private Clouds on the cheap instead.

“Microsoft’s business has been built on democratizing technology, making it easy to use and offering it at an affordable price — and we are doing that with cloud. With private cloud solutions, in particular, we have studies illustrating that customers could pay roughly four times to nearly 10 times more for a VMware private cloud solution,” reveals Brad Anderson, corporate vice president, Management and Security Division, Microsoft.

Microsoft has stressed time and again that its focus is to take customers from on-premises to the public Cloud, namely to Windows Azure.

Virtualization is in this regard, only a piece of the Microsoft Cloud puzzle, and the software giant is offering customers what it refers to as private Clouds, until such a time that they’ll be ready to switch to Windows Azure.

Oversimplifying, a Microsoft private Cloud has technologies such as Windows Server and System Center at its heart. The Hyper-V hypervisor is of course included.

“VMware’s approach is focused on virtualization, and you see that show up in its business model. For instance, VMware’s private cloud solution, Cloud Infrastructure Suite, appears to be priced by adding either virtual machines or memory to run mission-critical applications, charging you more as you grow. Our private cloud solutions are licensed on a per-processor basis, which means customers get the cloud computing benefits of scale with unlimited virtualization and lower costs consistently and predictably over time,” Anderson added.

“With Microsoft, as your workload density increases, so does your ROI. With VMware, as your workload density increases, so do your costs, which is kind of counter to the promise of the cloud. This approach to pricing is just another proof point to me that VMware is really just a virtualization company trying to talk cloud, as showcased in some of our outreach. Customers can also learn more about our private cloud ROI research and solutions.”