Xen and the art of Microsoft virtualisation
Yesterday was a big news day for
XenSource, the company founded by the originators of the open source Xen hypervisor, which is providing the commercial
XenEnterprise solution for the deployment, provisioning and management of virtualised environments based on Xen:
- Novell announced worldwide availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 which embeds Xen
- IBM said it will be supporting Xen as part of its Virtualization Engine bundle of virtualisation-related products
- Microsoft and XenSource announced that they will be cooperating on interoperability between Xen-enabled Linux and the Windows hypervisor (scheduled for release after Windows Server Longhorn).
Whilst all three announcements clearly highlight the momentum behind the Xen hypervisor, it's the last one which particularly caught my eye. The press release emphasises that this collaboration aims to "
build bridges across the industry" and deliver "
Interoperability by design" but I see another motivation for Microsoft, which has far more to do with hard-nosed competition than touchy-feely interoperability. Why? Look
here: $157 million revenue and 73% year-on-year growth for VMware as part of EMC's second quarter.
Microsoft recognises that server virtualisation is becoming an important initiative for many organisations and, more significantly, that VMware clearly has the momentum and the mind share. The company must know that its current offerings just don't stack up - particularly when it comes to the management tools which are what, and will increasingly, differentiate virtualisation solutions. And of course, it's almost a year before the Longhorn server wave gets under way - and longer before customers begin to deploy. Not forgetting, as well, that virtualisation is a key foundation stone of the Dynamic Systems Initiative.
Microsoft is threatened on many fronts and I think the company would rather have Xen-enabled Linux running on Virtual Server (Windows can already run on Xen by virtue of existing colloboration, which includes licensing of Microsoft's VHD virtual machine file format by XenSource), than see it running on VMware.
All of this competition can only be a good thing for organisations considering a virtualisation initiaitive. It's important, however, not to let all of these machinations about the underlying virtualisation engines obscure the bigger picture. The value of server and desktop virtualisation can only be fully realised with effective management and monitoring solutions which also deal with other resources - storage, network, applications (SOA anyone!) - and allow those resources to be delivered in a way which reflects business process priorities.
