Will Server 2012/Hyper-V overtake vSphere 5.1???

pwjohnston

As Microsoft gains, VMware insists that it maintains the upper hand | Ars Technica

Thoughts?

NinjaBoy

It's going to a battle, imo. I've been using Hyper-V versions 1 and now 2 at since it was released as it had the basic features that I wanted. However with version 3 it's going to be a close call (especially with System Center 2012). One company is going to release a great feature, that the other one is going to make the other one do their own version, then vice versa, vice versa, vice versa....

The only thing for sure is that we businesses (and consumers) are going to benefit from improved features and hopefully lower prices

pumbaa_g

My thoughts exactly, while using Hyper-V 2 I felt as if the product had a lot to be desired. What I am hearing about Hyper-V 3 seems to reinforce the fact that MS has put in a lot of work in making this a real winner. Add System Center 2012 to the mix and you have an impressive package which will make things really hot for VMware.
Considering that VMware had to kill the new pricing scheme that they had announced recently I feel that they are on the back foot here.
In the enterprise scenario MS has a significant advantage with their competitive pricing strategy.

jibbajabba

Agree with Pumbaa, considering how quickly VMWare dropped their vRam license model just shows that they are somewhat worried.

ptilsen

MS has known something for decades that VMware is just learning: You don't have to make the best product to have the most successful product. VMware has been shedding market share as a result of a horrible pricing structure. Having the best features overall doesn't matter if your competitors cut you out from the bottom up. Hyper-V was already poised to start taking over the smaller and stingier shops. The fact that MS is getting really competitive on overall functionality on top of being far more price-competitive puts VMware in serious trouble.

I don't expect VMware to disappear. I think we will see a lot of shops transition to Hyper-V until VMware adjusts its pricing model. At that point, I think we'll see market share stay pretty constant, with pretty much all shops adopting a virtualization platform and sticking with it indefinitely.

it_consultant

Yes. They will overtake VMWARE. It will take a while, seeing as though it only makes sense to change your virtualization strategy at hardware refresh time. If you have 99% windows OS guests then it makes little sense to pay for a hypervisor (at what...$2500 a processor) which isn't Windows based. Of course when you buy System Center for virtualization you are also buying a whole lot of other things that VMWARE does not and cannot provide. You get (as part of the new licensing scheme for system center) anti-virus, monitoring, backup, a ticketing system, VM replication, and a few other things. With VMWARE you get access to the backup binaries and their HA solution.

Daniel333

Depend on the market I would say. Vmware isn't even trying to sell to many SMBS. Their price is simply too far out there. For larger orgs, I would imagine VMware is too trenched in at this point. I believe VMWare will maintain their place until the majority of companies go Clouod first.

blargoe

VMware will continue to dominate large enterprises with heterogeneous server deployments and the highest I/O requirements. Aside from that, it wouldn't surprise me to see Microsoft make a significant gains in "new implementations" of virtual datacenter / private cloud technology in the next 1-2 years. But I don't see organizations that aren't at least 2/3 Microsoft falling all over themselves to use HyperV, especially if they are already using VMware and it is stable. Maybe you'll see the "Microsoft" teams in a company use Microsoft and others use VMware. It will be interesting to see how the next couple of years go.

jmritenour

I don't know if overtake is the right word, but I think it's going to make a huge dent the market. I've been hearing for years that Hyper-V was going to put VMware out of business, but 3.0 looks like the first version to really have the toolset to even compete with it. VMware's missteps with the vRAM pricing in 5.0 really put it out of SMBs budget, and as others have said, the fact that VMware is dropping it in 5.1 is a sign that they're realizing they've got some good competition coming.

I don't think VMware is going anywhere, because they've still way ahead in terms of scale, availability and guest OS support, but they've definitely going to lose some ground this round.

And yes, I'm definitely eating my words on this one - several months ago, I didn't believe VMware had anything to fear, but Hyper-V looks that strong in Server 2012.

dave330i

Microsoft has a history of over promising and under delivering. It's speculation until 3.0 is released.

it_consultant

dave330i wrote: »

Microsoft has a history of over promising and under delivering. It's speculation until 3.0 is released.

Its not really speculation. I have a couple of Server 2012 RC nodes right now set up and it delivers exactly as promised. I had a special consideration, I need to be able to grow the virtual hard disk over 2 TB without resorting to a pass through disk. As far as I know, VMWARE has not changed the format of the VMDK to support this. SCVMM 2012 and Server 2012 (even 08R2 if you can deal with a max of 4 virtual procs) are a different animal than previous versions of MS virtualization.