14 DAY TRIAL // Both Microsoft and VMWare agreed they'd better cooperate to make migration across differing virtualization environments easier. Then they announced they are working on it. And so the users will be able to migrate across differing virtualization environments and even run the virtualized files of one another. But so far neither of the two is talking about the way they will do this.
XenSource, a Microsoft partner and at the same time the company that is financially supporting the project Xen hypervisor, has declared through its spokepersons that there is a need for something else than a single specific standard, like a shared virtual file format for example.
Bob Tenczar, Microsoft's director of product management in the Windows Server division, has stated that Microsoft, with the help of interoperability agreements from Xen and Novell, will ensure the running of Linux in virtualized environments under Windows. Yet the VMDK format used by VMWare for the VMDK files makes these files impossible to run in Microsoft Virtual Server. And Microsoft VHD files won't run in VMware servers.
Patrick Lin, VMware's senior director of product management said this format war is not something they could take advantage of, but he also agreed that VMWare's VMDK is the most known and used format for developing and producing virtual appliances. And a successful standard is not something to throw away so easily. Lin also considered that Microsoft could be "somewhat more open about what it's doing".
Microsoft has been criticized by VMWare in the past as the latter said that some of the VHD files happened to end up formatted in such way they deactivated themselves if not running in a Microsoft's Virtual PC or Virtual Server.
Anyway, when confronted with the fact, Microsoft and VMWare seem to do nothing but talk when it comes to the cooperation for the virtualization environments. Patrick Lin said: "Initiatives are underway. They're just not ready for disclosure."