Microsoft's Hyper-V and Spin Marketing - the Parallels view

Here's another take on Microsoft’s announcement of Hyper-V. This time, the comments are coming from Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels. Surguei appears to be taking a rather pragmatic view of the announcement and all of the surrounding hype.

Here's what he had to say:

Congratulations to Microsoft on getting Hyper-V out – this is great news for the virtualization space as a whole since Microsoft’s entry into a market always draws considerable attention and the availability of Hyper-V will lower the barriers to adoption of server virtualization. That said, while we’re excited, the news is likely to be seen far less positively by vendors who rely on highly priced hypervisors for their revenue. Whilst users will need to pay for System Center VMM to use Hyper-V, it is still going to undercut the other established hypervisor tools, potentially representing a very serious threat for those companies.

Since Parallels continues to invest heavily in the automation of virtual infrastructure, we believe it’s critical to make virtualization accessible to the broadest range of users and workloads as possible. By offering a bundled solution, Microsoft is reaching a wider audience of potential virtualization users, but the breadth of deployments will still be fairly narrow: Windows environments that are currently reaching their upgrade cycle. In addition, the feature set of Hyper-V is limited, for example there’s a big deficit in platform support, with no support provided for Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, FreeBSD.

From a virtualization perspective, Hyper-V isn’t really a threat to us as we deliver an OS-level server virtualization solution, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, which solves a different set of problems than Hyper-V. This means we can offer a set of strengths suited for a more diverse range of workloads; from high performance workloads such as databases, which are unsuited to hypervisors due to the throughput degradation, to Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure, where the density and storage efficiency are key.

Snapshot Analysis

Although somewhat self-serving, Serguei's comments are right on the spot. Parallels has products in an adjacent space, operating system partitioning and virtualization software, as well as in the virtual machine software space. This gives him the opportunity to point out that Hyper-V's launch will be good for the overall market for virtualization technology, but won't be directly competitive with Parallels Virtuozzo Containers. It will, on the other hand, be competitive with Parallels other processing virtualization product on Windows, Parallels Server.

Serguei is wise to point out that virtual machine software and operating system virtualization and partitioning software are both supporting elements in a larger virtualized environment. Management of virtualized resources, security in that environment, storage agility and a few other components are equally important.

Note: I'll be traveling this week and will be posting on a time-available basis.