Last week's
launch
by Microsoft of Hyper-V brought out the enthusiasts right out of the gate,
as even gritty bloggers recognized that the hypervisor's price tag as part of
Windows Server 2008 (that is, free) is
pretty
alluring.
However, as we expected, not everybody is all that thrilled so far. We've been
hearing little tidbits here and there about how VMware and its ESX competitor
don't need to lose any virtual sleep over Hyper-V, but Angelo sent us the most
detailed user review of Microsoft's newest creation that we've seen yet:
"I have been experimenting with this 'new' product that is supposed
to compete with VMware ESX. And I have several notes that you and others should
be aware of.
- Every time any Microsoft OS patches are deployed, you begin having
issues with the guest OSes. I have tried different update orders: host first,
then Guest (ugly); guests first.
- There is no easy way to set up isolation networks and determine which
guests are attached to each virtual network.
- There is no reporting on the VM utilization of CPU, memory, drive
or network.
- There is no native support for cluster in a box (CIAB), without purchasing
expensive SANs.
- Provisioning new workstations is still a massive undertaking, and
keeping that image patched or up to date poses a real challenge.
As far as I am concerned, it is a nice toy to play with, but if you want
to get work done, stick with what works. The strength and power that VMware
has are well worth the money."
Thanks, Angelo. So, there you go -- not everybody's in line with the claim
that users won't give anything up when switching from ESX to Hyper-V. We expect
more of these e-mails in the days and weeks to come, both in support of ESX
and in defense of Hyper-V. Help us fill out or collection by contributing at
[email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/02/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Yes, this should make things much...easier? Microsoft this week introduced
Select Plus
Volume Licensing, a program intended to simplify and reduce the cost of
licensing for larger organizations. (We'll forgive Microsoft for giving this
program a name that sounds more like the name of a frequent flyer scheme: "We'd
like to board our Select Plus passengers at this time…")
Anyway, there's a pretty good synopsis of Select Plus here,
and, of course, there's Microsoft's
press release on the plan. Now, maybe we're just obtuse, but none of this
actually seems very simple. In fact, it seems pretty darn complicated and dense.
Regardless, Wall Street-types are concerned that the discounts in the plan
will hurt
Redmond's profit margins, while somebody at Forrester, at least, thinks
that the plan will be mostly good
for bigger companies.
Here at RCPU, we're...well, we're not really sure yet what this means for partners,
but we'd love for you to clue us in at [email protected].
So, uh, go ahead and do that. Thanks.
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/02/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Your editor is writing this entry from his childhood home outside of Dallas,
a place that always brings back memories of, well, childhood. Now that we're
stretching into the third or fourth inning of summer, a lot of those memories
are of playing baseball and soccer in the backyard and then weaving into the
house completely dehydrated (hey, it gets hot in Texas) and gulping gallons
of water. But one piece of news this week stirred our recollection of another
summer standard: the summer reading list.
At the end of every school year, some well-intentioned teacher would give her
students a list of books to read over the summer -- without the power of actually
being able to "assign" them. The more intellectual kids probably read
them, but your editor never did, preferring instead to devour Sports Illustrated
and the Dallas Morning News (yes, even as a kid) and then participate
in the aforementioned outdoor sporting activities.
Well, this summer, Microsoft has its own suggested reading, which should prove
more popular among certain audiences than the old summer reading list did in
this house: Redmond has released
"Version 1.0" of documentation on some of the protocols in its
most important products.
This is the stuff that Bill Gates -- you
might remember him as Microsoft's former CEO -- never wanted to publish.
But antitrust suits forced Microsoft's hand, and now the company's all
about interoperability and openness. This week's dump includes information
on protocols used in Exchange Server 2007, SharePoint Server 2007 and Office
2007, among other big-name Microsoft offerings.
So, who's hauling this tome to the beach or skipping a pick-up soccer game
to stay inside and read? Well, the European Union's competition cranks, for
sure, given that the existence of this documentation is as much their doing
as anybody else's, and given that they're
still not convinced that Microsoft is interested in interoperability. (Ha!
Just try to take the whole month of August off and still finish reading this
stuff by fall, Eurocrats.) But other audiences of immediate interest to Microsoft
will be turning pages, as well.
Specifically, the Office stuff will appeal to the nations
and organizations
that contend that Office Open XML, currently
an industry standard with a big asterisk on it (as in *pending
appeal), shouldn't be a standard at all. Plus, we imagine that some
Microsoft competitors might be a little bit curious about the new documentation.
Will Microsoft's summer reader be enough to assuage those hostile audiences?
We doubt it -- after all, this is really just an update of documentation released
in April -- but for Redmond, it's another step on the path to working more readily
with other vendors and with the industry as a whole.
And while we've defended here Microsoft's right to keep proprietary things
private, we also can't see all that much of a downside in Microsoft explaining
how its stuff works and making it easier for other vendors to work with it.
In other words, we have a feeling that divulging these precious trade secrets
won't put Microsoft out of business.
As for us, though, we'll be skipping Microsoft's summer page-turner. Next week's
Worldwide
Partner Conference and other events (along with a complete lack of skill
in both sports) will probably cut down severely on the baseball- and soccer-playing,
but we're pretty confident that we can still find better things to do this summer
than read 50,000 pages of protocol documentation -- like, for instance, anything.
What's your take on Microsoft's new "openness"? Will you be reading
all 50,000 pages this summer? Sound off at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/01/2008 at 1:22 PM1 comments
It's "Fiji," for heaven's sake. This is a family newsletter! Anyway,
apparently, Microsoft's codename of Fiji -- which the company is using for a
forthcoming edition of Windows Media Center -- isn't actually going down all
that well in...Fiji. Mary Jo Foley
explains.
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/01/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
We say
"finally"
because apparently Symantec was all over it weeks ago.
By the way, should we read anything at all into the fact that Microsoft, which
is now more than a year into its effort to be a security vendor, had a "bug"
that messed up certain Symantec applications? Hmm, should we? Probably not,
but we do like to cause trouble when we can.
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/01/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
You might say that Microsoft's record on getting fixes out to its users is
becoming a little, uh,
patchy.
Posted by Lee Pender on 07/01/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
If there's any constant with MSPs, it's change. Not that that's unusual in the technology industry, but MSPs seem to have changed models and strategies more in the last few years than most other companies in most categories. They even changed their name: remember Applications Service Providers?
Well, the change continues, as companies refine outsourcing strategies. The new thing, apparently, is great big companies using multiple MSPs rather than going with just one or two, and general flooding of competition in the MSP market. This article spells everything out in great detail, and although it's written by a Brit, old bean, from a UK perspective, it still makes for an interesting read. Or it will, anyway, until everything changes again.
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/30/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
All that noise MSPs have been making about how complicated unified communications can be? Apparently
it was more than just noise...
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/30/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
What do companies look for when searching for an MSP? This fairly
comprehensive article gives us an idea -- which could be useful both for MSPs and the companies searching for them.
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/30/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
In case you hadn't noticed, the first four letters in the word "hyper"
are H-Y-P-E. And, until today, a lot of what we knew about the core product
in Microsoft's virtualization strategy, the Hyper-V hypervisor, was just that:
hype. (Well, hype and the fact that,
as
we've maintained, Hyper-V sounds like an '80s break-dancing name.)
OK, so that's not entirely true -- the hype part, anyway; we stand by the breakdancing
thing. Hyper-V has been
in beta for a while, and some partners have customers running on it and
have for some time. Microsoft says that a million people have downloaded the
Hyper-V beta and are using the product. (Then again, Microsoft calls Vista a
success.) So, we do know something more about Hyper-V than just hype.
Still, Hyper-V has been mostly a series of press releases and a concept for
many customers and partners -- until today.
As of today, Hyper-V is out there. Microsoft officially
released its competitor to VMware ESX today, sending partners into a virtual(ization)
frenzy. In all seriousness, though, Microsoft partners are talking about the
opportunities that Hyper-V will provide -- and about its advantages over ESX,
the runaway market leader from VMware.
There's another four-letter word (other than "hype," that is) that's
important here: free. Hyper-V comes built into Windows Server 2008, meaning
that clients have already bought it when they pay for a Windows Server 2008
license. And that's a big selling point over VMware, one partner told RCPU.
"It's an easy sell because it's included and it's free," said Rand
Morimoto, president and CEO of Convergent Computing.
"If you compare Hyper-V to VMware, they're identical."
That's another thing. Functionality-wise, Morimoto said, customers won't lose
anything in transitioning from ESX to Hyper-V, or in just implementing Hyper-V,
period. But that transition might still prove to be a hard sell. VMware, after
all, produces a popular set of products and has a presence in nearly every big
company in the world -- and in a lot of smaller ones, too.
Morimoto, who also sells VMware as well as working with Microsoft, isn't out
to change that, necessarily: "The position that we have is that we have
a lot of customers that are running VMware," Morimoto said. "We're
providing customers the option. If a customer puts a foot down and says, 'We're
a VMware shop,' we're not going to try to change them."
However, he wants to consult his clients as to how they might save money down
the road by transitioning to Hyper-V. Morimoto suggests a hybrid environment
-- or possibly a slow transition from VMware to what he called the more cost-effective
(read: free with Windows Server 2008) Hyper-V.
"We're not asking you to throw [VMware] away, but we're saying think twice
about continuing to invest," he said. "Depreciate initial investment
[in VMware], and everything after that is free." And for shops with no
virtualization at present, Morimoto said that Hyper-V is an obvious choice.
For his part, Zane Adam, senior director of virtualization in the System Center
group at Microsoft, explained to RCPU that Hyper-V is just one part -- albeit
the core -- of Microsoft's overall virtualization strategy. "We have solutions
from the datacenter all the way to the desktop," Adam said.
Well, we're sure you do, and we'll get to all that -- along with VMware's side
of things -- one of these days. But for our purposes today, Hyper-V's release
represents Microsoft's first serious shot over VMware's bow. And despite the
(continued) hype it's sure to get now that it's out, we don't expect VMware
to shut its doors, nor do we anticipate that the extremely popular virtualization
vendor will stand still. After all, VMware is still the monster in the virtualization
space, and Microsoft is the minnow.
Still, the Windows Server-Hyper-V bundle could be powerful. We can see where
Morimoto and the Microsoft folks are coming from with that message. After all,
the whole "better together" thing has worked for Microsoft before
and is still at the core of the company's very successful enterprise strategy.
So, bring on Hyper-V, we say...and bring on even more hype.
Do you have any experience with Hyper-V? Tell us at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/26/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
It looks as though Microsoft is going to kill XP after all, despite flickers
of
hope
to the contrary. In fact, Microsoft officials were pretty adamant about
saying that
XP
isn't here to stay, although the famous "downgrade" option is
still on the table -- you know, until we're all "ready for Vista,"
which should be any time now.
Posted by Lee Pender on 06/26/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments