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Microsoft Hyper-V and Spin Marketing - Virtual Iron Chimes In

As I mentioned in the post, Microsoft Hyper-V and Spin Marketing, a number of companies contacted me in the hopes of presenting their view of Microsoft's Hyper-V announcement. This is the first of several posts on what they had to say.
Written by Dan Kusnetzky, Contributor

As I mentioned in the post, Microsoft Hyper-V and Spin Marketing, a number of companies contacted me in the hopes of presenting their view of Microsoft's Hyper-V announcement. This is the first of several posts on what they had to say.

My friends at Virtual Iron; Tony Assaro, VI's Chief Strategy Officer, and Tim Walsh, VI's Director of Corporate Marketing; and I had a discussion about what was said and what was left unsaid during the Microsoft Hyper-V launch.

Although the conversation went into great depth, I'll try to summarize the conversation in the following bullets knowing that VI will point out where I've goofed up.

  • Hypervisors are just a component of a larger, complex stack of software. The maturity the hypervisor, how well it integrates into the environment, how compatible it is with a broad range of operating systems and workloads are extremely important. Hyper-V appears to be a good start. It will take time for it to be available in all forms for everyone. It will also take time for the full integration of this technology into the environment to take place.
  • Reliability and availability of virtual machines running on any specific hypervisor is of strategic importance. Hyper-V doesn't offer VM shadowing for continuous availability; LAN-based migration allowing workload orchestration, maintenance and automation; or off-site migration for disaster recovery.
  • Hyper-V adoption will follow the adoption of Windows Server 2008. If history is a guide, this adoption will not be immediate.
  • The big upside is that even though Microsoft's technology is still in the formative stages, Microsoft's entry into the market will tend to educate IT and business decision-makers on the benefits that virtual machine technology could provide. This education process will tend to benefit all suppliers of VM technology.

I believe that what they had to say was well taken. Do you agree?

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