VMware: Microsoft rethinking the role of the hypervisor

Well this is a quote out of NW:

“Their product architecture is that virtualization is part of the [operating system] so they seem to be rethinking what hypervisor should be,” says Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions for VMWare. “They are going to be coming out in almost one year with a basic-function hypervisor where today we have a robust hypervisor and 20,000 customers.” And Raghuram adds WMWare comes with benefits such as availability and various management tools.

This Forrester analyst says:

“It’s not about server virtualization,” Forrester analyst Frank Gillett told Network World in August, “It’s about when I have virtual servers I can completely change how I think about IT infrastructure. When I move virtual servers around I have to have storage that is not only networked but flexible so when I move the virtual server the storage connections go with it.”

I says ;-), the client are eventually looking for this.

• Heterogeneity: Year 2008: VMware in production, Xen in test, Virtual Iron in development and Hyper-V in development. Year 2009: VMware in development, Microsoft in Production, Xen in test and xVM in staging. Year 2010: VMware, Xen, xVM, KVM, Hyper-v in production, test, development and staging. So to achieve a "truly heterogeneous infrastructure", one will have to think of eliminating the disconnect between the hypervisors and other solutions. Our goal is to make our infrastructure highly agile, and you don't get agility when you're stuck with one.
  
• Portability: Common platform to port infra from place to place. Port appications or virtual appliances from platform to platform, seamlessly.
  
• Interoperability: All those hypervisors ought to talk to each other. Us, on the business layer ought to start working on making our business model agiler than ever! We ought to stop looking at the hypervisor all the time.

See the rest of the NW article.