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For some arcane reason it didn’t merit a press release, but yesterday Microsoft released System Center Virtual Machine Manager to manufacturing. Microsoft’s Chris Stirrat has full details on the Windows Virtualization Team Blog, but the elevator pitch is that SCVMM (or VMM) is a tool for large enterprises to manage their virtual machines with the same ease as today’s management tools allow them to manage physical server machines.
Some pertinent details:
It’s good news for Microsoft that some of their virtualization efforts are delivering on time, since they are playing a tough catch up game with VMWare. Microsoft pricing certainly undercuts VMWare’s management offerings as this Computerworld article by Eric Lai details, but I’m less certain of the advantage to Microsoft than the analysts quoted. If you run an all Microsoft shop, then certainly Microsoft has a leg up, but a heterogeneous installation is likely to be using management tools from IBM’s Tivoli or other vendors and VMWare’s offering is designed to be integrated with them.
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September 11th, 2007 at 9:41 PM
[...] There’s more marketing speak there about Microsoft’s virtualization efforts including Virtual Machine Manager 2007 and a new deal with Citrix, the perennial Microsoft pilot fish, which is trumpeted as Microsoft and Citrix Extend Virtualization Alliance: Today at VMworld 2007, Microsoft Corp. and Citrix Systems Inc.announced that they have strengthened their longtime integration alliance in the desktop and application delivery market by standardizing on the Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format as a common runtime environment for both virtualized operating systems and applications. This collaboration will result in future versions of Citrix’s Desktop Server and virtual application solutions adopting the Microsoft VHD format. At the same time, Microsoft plans to adapt a future version of Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization for both the desktop and Terminal Services to the VHD format. [...]