The virtualization market is an area where Microsoft is yet to prove itself, coming from the position of the underdog. But this of course is not to say that the Redmond company is not committed to the long haul, and cooking products designed to rival the best that household names such as Vmware have to offer. Still, while Microsoft has yet to deliver on a comprehensive portfolio of virtualization offerings, Dave Northey , a member of Microsoft Ireland's Developer and Platform Group, took matters into his own hands and performed an ESX Server 3i vs. Windows Server Virtualization comparison.

ESX Server 3i from Vmware will have "a bunch on "new features" that we have either been doing for ages, or have announced that we will have in Windows Server Virtualisation (WSV), when we ship Windows Server 2008. They call out 64GB virtual machines and 128GB physical machines. We'll do 64GB virtual machines with WSV and 64-bit Windows will work with systems with up to 1 Terabyte of physical memory. The reason for this, if you're interested is that our hypervisor is 64-bit and ESX is still 32-bit. They call out support for virtualisation-aware (para-virtualised) Linux operating systems. We are working with both Novell and XenSource, so we'll do that too (we already support both RedHat and SUSE Linux on Virtual Server)", Northey said.

Of course the major problem with Windows Server Virtualization from Microsoft is that the software is less than fully baked. In fact, it's cooking as we speak. Moreover, the Redmond company has released a Community Technology Preview of Windows Server Virtualization, codenamed Viridian concomitantly with the first release Candidate of Windows Server 2008, formerly codenamed Longhorn. In contrast, Vmware is much closer than Microsoft to making the final version of ESX Server 3i available. Viridian will follow Windows Server 2008 to the market later on, during the upcoming year.

"the 'funniest' is the reference to expanded hardware support (storage and networking). Both Virtual Server and WSV use native Windows device drivers - have a look at Windows Server Catalog, you'll see that we already support over 6,500 storage items. Both our server virtualisation offerings (Virtual Server and WSV) are completely hardware independent - as long as there is a Windows device driver, you're OK. VMware has a very small, limited sub-set of hardware that they can run on", Northey added.