Network World published a short interview with Mike Neil, General Manager for Virtualization Strategies at Microsoft.
The interview is interesting mainly because of two statements.
First:
Server virtualization is still a developing market and technology. Since, to a great degree, the utilization of virtualization has been in relatively confined areas, typically in large enterprises or infrastructure products like [VMware’s] ESX Server, Microsoft will be able to have a much broader approach and make virtualization available to a wider swath of the industry.
And second (talking about VMware VMotion feature):
From a competitive standpoint, it is a sexy feature and sounds really exciting. But, of the Microsoft customers using VMware or other virtualization technology, few are actually utilizing that type of functionality. It is a relatively sophisticated piece of technology to set up. The capabilities we do have and are shipping — our ability to cluster virtual machines and the ability to migrate quickly — will meet most customers’ needs.
So Microsoft basically believes virtualization is still at its beginning. virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Challenges report is demonstrating this is very true.
But Microsoft is also downplaying value of virtual machines live migration, which instead is where virtualization is expressing its highest value at the moment.
When using virtualization in production environment there’s no customer, enterprise or SMB-grade, that would ever refuse such capability if it comes affordable and reliable. The fact that VMware VMotion in particular is currently demanding expensive and complex pre-requisites is another story.