Microsoft has troubled road ahead with virtualisation

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 15 July 2008 15:18

Business IT - Technology

According to tech market analyst firm Ovum, Microsoft is in serious damage control over the huge technology gulf it needs to bridge in the virtualisation space. The problem for Microsoft is that market leader VMware is so far ahead of it in its hypervisor software and associated management tools, that it could even threaten the Windows revenue.

The issue for Microsoft, according to Ovum, is that the software giant cannot afford to let VMware or any other virtualisation software company gain control of the bottom layer of corporate server operating systems with hypervisor software. Microsoft can't afford to allow Windows to become just another guest operating system running as a virtual machine hosted by server running a hypervisor made by another company.

To put things into perspective, however, Microsoft has just released its first hypervisor product Hyper-V to market. VMware developed its hypervisor in 2000. It's virtualisation software and management tools are way ahead of anything that Microsoft has, making the situation for the software giant in the data centres of enterprises around the world a dire one.

As Ovum analyst Tim Stammers puts it:

"Microsoft badly needs Hyper-V to be successful. Just one of the reasons why is that server virtualisation threatens to loosen its grip on its Windows revenues, and even its own prices and licensing schemes.

"Judging by VMware’s fabulous growth rate and the enthusiasm shown by customers for server virtualisation, within a few years a sizeable proportion of Windows servers will be virtualized. Whoever supplies the layer of v-word software that sits underneath Windows will have their hands on a powerful lever.

"If the price of the virtualisation layer goes up, so too will the price of an overall Windows system. Questions are already being asked about the best pricing schemes to apply to multiple virtualized operating systems, and it is not impossible that the schemes that suit virtualisation suppliers will not suit Microsoft. Third-party virtualisation suppliers could even vary their prices according to the guest operating system, for example making it more expensive to host Windows than Linux."

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