In just two days Microsoft completely reshaped its virtualization strategy. Yesteday:
- It announced System Center Virtual Machines Manager (SCVMM) capability to manage Citrix XenServer and Presentation Server
- It announced Hyper-V capability to use Citrix XenDeskop as VDI connection broker
- It announced acquisition of Calista Technologies to enhance its RPD protocol for VDI environments
- It announced virtualization of Vista Home Basic and Home Premium Editions
- It announced support for Office when virtualized through Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid)
But that’s not enough. Today Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, stated thatapplication virtualization is crucial for desktop and servers.
In other words Muglia announced that Application Virtualization will be available also for servers.
This position has a massive impact on the way virtualization will be sold and adopted by customers.
Despite support and licensing issues that slow down application virtualization adoption today, so far the technology has been pushed as a more efficient and less demanding approach than hardware virtualization for corporate’s clients. But when the technology reaches the corporate servers suddenly an overlap and a conflict with hardware virtualization appears.
Should I virtualized a database server with hardware virtualization (through virtual machines) or with application virtualization (thorugh virtual layers)?
The new Microsoft answer to this question is: with both.
If Microsoft releases Application Virtualization for Windows Server it’s not killing its Hyper-V strategy: it’s implicitly suggesting to use hardware virtualization for OS delivery and application virtualization for services delivery.
And the nested use of both technologies is a major step towards a dynamic data center which virtualization.info usually calls liquid computing.
At this point Microsoft only misses one layer between these two: the OS virtualization one provided by SWsoft. But Redmont giant may be working on this as well.