Microsoft Takes Virtualization to the Next Level

Microsoft has stepped firmly on a path that will take it on a direct collision course with the current leader of the actualization solution market VMware, with the release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007. Microsoft is indeed late to the game as Vmware accounts for over 70% of the market, but the Redmond company can leverage its dominance of its Windows server operating system in contrast to UNIX, Linux and Mainframe solutions in order to push its virtualization software to centerstage and concomitantly taking VMware out of the limelight and throwing it to the periphery.

But System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 is nothing more than the first step. Microsoft will fight the real battle with Viridian. Essentially, SCVMM, codenamed Carmine is nothing more than a Microsoft system management product, designed to deliver unified management capabilities for both physical and virtual machines. In addition to providing centralized virtual machine infrastructure administration, SCVMM will also enable the consolidation of physical servers and the efficient provisioning of new virtual machines.

"I am extremely proud to announce that after 2 short (OK - it didn't always seem short...) years of customer focused development. Throughout the release we have had over 32 TAP (Technology Adoption Partners) customers and 10 partners which have been testing, giving great feedback and creating solutions with the beta versions of SCVMM. Microsoft's own internal IT group has been managing 100% of their virtual environment (86 physical hosts running 1224 VMs) in production with SCVMM since Beta2 with no (that is zero) impact on their SLAs. To date we have over 20,678 public beta users of SCVMM and the product is available in 9 different languages," revealed Chris Stirrat, the head of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager team.

Microsoft will make SCVMM 2007 available for purchase as a component of the company's System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise. SCVMM 2007 will be sold in October 2007. The current edition of SCVMM is focused on managing virtual machines in Virtual Server 2005. The next build however, will permit the management of Viridian/Windows Server 2008 VMs and apps. Viridian is Microsoft's hypervisor, namely a product that acts as an extra layer between the hardware platform and the operating system.

"Our next release is planned to coincide with the release of Windows Server Virtualization (codename Viridian) so that we can expose all the great features it provides. In addition to Viridian support - we are also adding some key customer driven features. We have heard loud and clear from customers and partners that we need to manage other virtualization environments in addition to Windows virtualization. They want a single management solution that manages all the different hypervisor technologies. So - in our next set of releases will be adding support for non-Windows virtualization environments - specifically VMWare and Xen," Stirrat added.