The hypervisor as commodity, the management tools as big expenses

Microsoft quietly announced a new timeline and pricing for the Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008, the tool intended to manage Hyper-V, Network World reports. The company posted this information in its System Center management blog last week. VMM 2008 is scheduled to ship in the fourth quarter although anyone who follows Microsoft knows that ship-date promises posted in a blog isn't the same as a commitment written in stone. The last time Microsoft discussed VMM 2008, it was talking as if the product would be out by the third quarter, no later than Sept. 1, the article says. More important than the couple of months of wiggle room Microsoft is giving itself, is that the software will also be sold as a stand-alone product, and be bundled with System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise (SMSE). The article says:

Microsoft says the stand-alone license for VMM would be priced 10% to 15% less than SMSE, which is designed for managing physical and virtual server. Given recent updates to Operations Manager, Configuration Manager and those coming with VMM, Microsoft says it will increase the $1,290 price of SMSE when VMM 2008 ships. At the current SMSE price, the cost for the stand-alone VMM license would be between $1,100 and $1,150. VMM 2008 will be sold as a per-device enterprise server management license and will include rights to the management server.

Given that the high prices that VMware has been charging, even with this price boost in Microsoft's management wares, Microsoft may still be an affordable option when comparing costs of hypervisors-plus-management software between the two competitors. The cost of VMware was at one time justified by the money saved on hardware. That rationale is long gone now that lower cost hypervisor alternatives have arrived.

But that's not all. Citrix wants to heat up the hypervisor wars to a boiling point. In a podcast interview with blogger Mitchell Ashley, Simon Crosby, CTO of virtualization at Citrix (and formerly with XenSource) made it clear that he wants the hypervisor to become nothing more than a commodity. With the open-source Xen model as the core, and Hyper-V shipping, the commodity hypervisor has indeed arrived. Vendors will want to make their money and differentiate themselves on their management wares. But in the long run, users will wind up in happy land -- with cheap, plentiful hypervisors and systems management tools that do a lot for the money, including manage a wide variety of hypervisors.

Stick around and listen to the podcast right now.

  Listen:

Visit the Microsoft Subnet home page for more news, blogs, podcasts.
More Microsoft Subnet blog posts:
Microsoft's Zoomix acquisition gives it the "semantic" SQL Server
Users prefer Cisco NAC over Microsoft NAP, researchers say
Legal trouble for Blackberry and iPhone users

The hypervisor as commodity, the management tools as big expenses