logo

This is typical for hot technologies. There are a few early innovators that create the technology and as they gain success, others follow, and the market quickly commoditizes. We’ve seen this a number of times before. And as with these previous technologies, the last piece (and often forgotten piece) is management. Standards are slow to emerge in the management space and vendors rush to try to add value to justify the commodity under the covers. This is exactly what is taking place in the hypervisor market. Microsoft has set their price as $28 for Hyper-V. Xen is “free” and the gorilla of them all, VMWare, has announced a “lite” version at a much reduced price. In the end, the hypervisor will be free and part of the server platform. The next battle will be around the management of this new virtual world, and as in the past, this battle will take many years to evolve and will go in many different directions, as the lack of standards means each vendor will provide their own flavor. Customers should look for a management system that is heterogeneous and provides value over and above just hypervisor management. Physical machine management is still a very important part of the data center, as are things like high availability, disaster recovery, charge back, and other management services that create real business value for the data center. The integration of physical and virtual machine management, along with higher value management tools, in a heterogeneous way is the nirvana that data center managers are looking for.