Vendor food fights are sometimes enjoyable to watch provided you are not in the middle. Last week, we saw VMware react to a SolarWinds blog post claiming that Gartner is predicting that 85% of businesses with less than 1,000 employees will be Microsoft Hyper-V shops. The SolarWinds reference is not quoted, so it is tough to say whether this is accurate or not. VMware countered with:

Gartner states, “By 2015, at least 75% of Hyper-V VMs will be installed in enterprises with fewer than 1,000 employees” in the “VMware vs. Microsoft: Competition for the Cloud Infrastructure” presentation done by Thomas Bittman at the 2011 Gartner Datacenter conference in Dec 2011.

They are saying of all the Hyper-V VMs, 75% of them will be in SMB with <1000 employees. This does not mean that 75% (or 85%) of SMBs will use Hyper-V.

So now the question - does this fact throw down even matter? Does anyone believe Microsoft will not dominate the low end of the SMB market and gradually crawl their way up the market?

To learn more and to read the entire VKernel blog post, click here: The Rise of Hyper-V? SolarWinds Hits a Virtual VMware Nerve- VKernel Blog