PCWorld magazine posted a really interesting article saying that Microsoft is targeting systems management as a way for it to differentiate itself from its virtualization platform competitors.
Anticipating that the market for virtualization software, such as Microsoft's Hyper-V, eventually will be commoditized, the company sees management as the key revenue opportunity for competitors offering server virtualization, said Windows Enterprise and Management Division General Manager Larry Orecklin, speaking to reporters on Microsoft's campus Tuesday.
"Management becomes really the thing we believe is critical to ensuring customers can get full value from the virtualization opportunity," he said.
Orecklin said that for all the hype around virtualization, less than 10 percent of data centers are virtualized today, according to research firm IDC. The reason for the slow adoption is that once companies began to virtualize their environments, they realized that the economics and logistics of managing them was quite difficult, he said.
To that end, Microsoft is going to make virtualization management the cornerstone of its virtualization strategy, and even open up its management platform to manage competitor solutions such as those from VMware and Citrix. As of right now, the Virtual Machine Manager product only manages Virtual Server. However, once Hyper-V is released, the management applications is expected to add support for both Hyper-V and VMware ESX with support for Xen somewhere thereafter. Microsoft plans to outline its virtualization strategy further at its Microsoft Management Summit next week. So keep an eye out for more information at that time.