For VMware, whether Microsoft is in a step-by-step

With the increase in virtualization and license costs, Microsoft's Hyper-V is also starting to look for its own niche in the SMB market, and in this trend, can Microsoft capture more servers for the second tier of companies? Most of the answers are yes, some analysts say: despite the fact that VMware's management tools and automation tools are in place, Microsoft can do it.

Although in the enterprise's data center, generally in the procurement, automation, high manageability and high availability these performance will often let the enterprise no longer to assess the cost, but when the free this "price" in front of you, you will refuse? Even with the cost of technology complexity and the interconnection of virtual servers, big businesses should not be left behind. In the room filled with servers, in the wiring room, in the small and medium-sized enterprises in the semi-closed cubicle, free is completely impossible to be rejected. For some customers, simplicity is the direction that determines where they go.

JLR Recherche Immobilière, the company's main business in Canada and the United States, collects, packs and resell data on land sales, and vice president Christian Boivin of its headquarters in Montreal said: "When I first started to touch virtualization, I only know the company of VMware (VMW). The price is too high for my demand. ”

Boivin said: "I have to buy a SAN, also need to buy some licenses and some servers." "Boivin does not use VMware's complete solution, nor does it use open source hypervisor (e.g. XenServer) to DIY, he rented the VM6 software, VMware's software can pack the existing Windows Server, They are then stored in a virtual device based on Microsoft Hyper-V, and Hyper-V is a free plugin for Windows Server 2008.

Boivin packed 12 physical servers into two mirrored virtual hosts, two of which were placed elsewhere, primarily as a carrier of disaster recovery, which stores about 3TB of current data, of which 250GB is currently in use, with a high demand for data, They are mainly available to Canadian and American evaluators, banks and realtors.

What features are missing from the free version

"It is important to note what management consoles are missing from the free version of Hyper-V," said Gary Chen, an IDC server virtualization analyst. To run a virtual device, OS licenses and other plug-ins are required, which leads to the cost of the solution offered by Microsoft is close to the cost of the solution offered by VMware: But the solution offered by Microsoft is always cheaper. ”

"The problem is also critical for purchasing decisions: While Microsoft has expanded Hyper-V capabilities, it is a bit less than VMware's excellent automation and management capabilities," Chen said. "(and at next week's VMworld conference, VMware will definitely introduce more new features.) ）

Hyper-V also lacks some functionality, such as: When a crash occurs, which virtual machine should be restarted first, and Hyper-V cannot set such a priority. Until recently, independent software providers provided some support for the introduction of Hyper-V-based management and storage applications.

"Most hyper-V customers are hardcore fans of Microsoft products, or their requirements are rather low," Chen said. For those who are looking for a good enough product, it is good enough. It's certainly not going to grow as fast as people expect; in fact, in the last few quarters, it's basically flat. ”

Hyper-V snuck into the branch office.

"Not only small companies and companies with simpler it requirements are looking at Hyper-V," says James Staten, a virtualization and infrastructure analyst at Forrest Research. "Many companies are renegotiating their corporate license agreements and they know how much more virtual machines will cost to deploy," Staten said. When you have to adjust a license agreement (which allows you to use 500 servers, but you already use 600 servers and you expect to use 900 servers), you may want to step back and think: can I lower these costs a little? ”

Although Enterprise Strategy Group published a report in July, 56% of all customers who installed virtual servers were using hypervisor from multiple vendors. But Forrester's Staten estimates that users will not migrate to Hyper-V on a large scale.

"VMware provides automation, management capabilities, and new features that are about to be released, such as the self-service provided in a cloud management product called Project Redwood," he said. policy-controlled functionality) will allow it to maintain its leadership in the data center cluster. ”

However, even some large, VMware-centric companies have been accidentally spotted, hyper-V has snuck into the virtual server farm of their subsidiaries, or snuck into some supporting application servers (for example, firewalls and spam filtering servers), Tight IT budgets may not be able to take care of these aspects.

"Many of the customers we work with have heterogeneous virtualized environments and not everyone needs to know about it, but there are many virtual servers based on Hyper-V in these environments that have been brought to the attention of some third party management companies," Staten said. That's why you see more and more management companies announcing support for Hyper-V and VMware. "For some lower priority servers, it may be more meaningful to use Hyper-V, which requires less availability and disaster recovery capabilities for this tier of servers, so they are better suited to run on Hyper-V," said Chen, the EMA. ”

"The problem with this is that once you're in this class, you'll always be stuck there; there's no easy way to upgrade," he said. Now you can manage your hybrid environment; You can even migrate a virtual machine from Hyper-V to VMware, but this process is not ' lossless ' and is neither automated nor transparent enough. "Earlier this year, VMware recognized his inferior position in the middle market and, in response, released a range of Low-cost products," Chen said. ”

When VMware released vsphere 4.1 in July, it also issued the lowest-level Essentials Server license, which dropped from $995 to $495, and also to the essentials, which contains three server licenses The plus License Pack adds vmotion functionality, and this License pack also provides high availability features. Microsoft also provides free livemotion functionality and HA functionality on Hyper-V. "Over time, many IT organizations will have to face more pressure, mainly from business: the technology costs that have been slashed have to continue to be cut," Staten said. ”

He said: "When some companies are doing ' physical to virtual ', they find that consolidation can significantly save costs. When they did this, they didn't cut the number of servers, but increased the number of virtual machines and purchased a large number of virtual machine licenses, and they found that costs were increasing and they wanted to be controlled. ”

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