VMware vs. HyperV Story Goes Mainstream

The New York Times has picked up on the concept of virtualization with two articles by Steve Lohr, one on VMware, and the other on the competition between VMware and HyperV.

This is going to be interesting.  The feedback I've been getting from colleagues in my classes is what one would expect: strong support of VMware.  The product is quite popular amongst both system admins and storage types.  We like VMware, we work with it, and we're usually suspicious of Microsoft products that go gunning for important parts of our data centers.

Still, this remark by Lohr caught my eye:

Last week, Microsoft issued a press release saying companies were switching from VMware to Microsoft HyperV, and the ones that did saved a lot of money. It named 16 organizations, including companies. The next day, VMware said it had signed up more than 21,000 new customers in the first half of 2009.

Lohr offers a number of cavaets to these statistics, particularly the notion that, because HyperV is free, companies may be just testing the waters rather than jumping right into the Microsoft pool.  I suspect that's the case.  Even if an enterprise-level customer wants to make a switch of this magnitude (either implementing virtualization from scratch or switching from VMware), the admins will want to do some trials.  To make those trials significant, you've got to pick a decent-sized department or project.  Those projects can produce stats that Microsoft can spin into positive trends.

From the perspective of an interested bystander (and VMware Workstation user), a fight between EMC and Microsoft would be interesting.  From the perspective of someone who teaches for HDS Academy, the expansion of HyperV's share of the virtualization market is interesting.  Rumor is that Microsoft is already putting a squeeze on EMC.  The boys and girls in Redmond are very territorial about what they allow in their data centers.  For example, many HDS folks have always told me that the Hitachi Content Archive Platform (HCAP) has no chance to work its way into Microsoft.  The reason? HCAP's operating system is Linux, not Windows.

If this philosophy is true (and widespread), this could get very interesting.  EMC is fairly well-entrenched (particularly the Clariion platform) at Microsoft.  If the VMware-HyperV fight gets ugly (and all indications are that it will), would that be enough to push MS away from EMC storage?  If so, nature abhors a vacuum, and that could open up interesting opportunities for HDS.