14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is among a very select group of companies deemed as leaders in the x86 server virtualization infrastructure market by Gartner. The software giant is joining VMWare and Citrix Systems in Gartner’s x86 Server Virtualization Magic Quadrant at a crucial time when virtualization uptake is trending up with over 40% of x86 architecture workloads estimated to have already been virtualized on servers as of the summer of 2011.
More importantly, it appears that Microsoft is making consistent headway against VMware, with the Redmond company benefiting from adoption by midsized business customers.
“Although market share leader VMware continues to set the standard in products and the pace in terms of strategy, Microsoft has increased its market share (especially among midmarket customers new to virtualization), and Citrix is leveraging its desktop virtualization strengths and its free XenServer offering to expand its server virtualization share,” Gartner opined.
“The road map from virtualization to cloud computing is rapidly evolving, and executing will be very important during the next year as this market continues to rapidly evolve and grow.”
Microsoft’s hypervisor technology is witnessing an acceleration of the adoption pace, understandable considering the evolution that the company catalyzed following the introduction of Hyper-V in 2008 with the release of Hyper-V R2 which offered such features as Live Migration.
According to Gartner, Microsoft is convincing approximately one in every three midmarket customers fresh virtualization adopters to embrace Hyper-V, attracted by the low price of the hypervisor offering.
“When evaluated objectively, Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) usually meet the requirements for midmarket or branch office deployments,” Gartner added.
With the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Microsoft also enhanced Hyper-V, adding Dynamic Memory capabilities.
“At the hypervisor and basic administration level, Microsoft has closed most of its technology gaps with market leader VMware (which tends to have an advantage with higher-level management and automation tools),” Gartner said.
“The most significant hypervisor difference continues to be Microsoft's reliance on a parent operating system on each virtualization host — which carries the benefit of a proven driver architecture, but the burden of potentially more planned downtime for patching and maintenance (however, Microsoft's patch record to date for its parent operating system has been good).
In order to fully take on VMWare, Microsoft needs to start focusing more on large enterprises, especially by streamlining the migration from VMWare solutions to its own Hyper-V and System Center.