Virtualization: Battlefield between Microsoft and VMware

Tuesday, April 10, 2012 | AKRAMUZZAMAN at 11:31 AM |

Microsoft versus VMware

Virtualization: Battlefield – Microsoft versus VMware

The real struggle for virtualization market has started recently. Several years ago, the technology firmly associated with VMware Company and had many limitations for applications. Now, practically all manufacturers of infrastructure management confess that sooner or later virtualization will form the basis of IT companies which have at least few dozen servers and workstations.

The main players of the virtualization market are considered VMware, Microsoft,Citrix and Oracle.   Examining the stages of technology development, we can see that the key technology is the ability to “hot” transfer of virtual machines between physical servers and storage without interrupting their work as well as the means for automation of administrators’ tasks that formed the basis of many distributed services.
Many years ago, such tec
hnologies possessed VMware, the leader of themarket. Against this background, Microsoft promoted very deliberately the product Microsoft Virtual Server which is based on the elaborations of Virtual PC and seemed it was not going to join the fight for market of virtualization, while VMware conquered confidently the market and griped the sector of large corporate clients.
Realizing its technological lag, Microsoft has joined the fight and announced the Windows Server Virtualization technology which later appeared in the server operating system Windows Server 2008 and the hypervisor itself was called Hyper-V. It should be noted that Microsoft bided on slightly different from VMware model for platform distribution, and called the VMware approach “virtualization tax” or “vTax”. Microsoft virtualization has become a part of server operating system.

Differences between VMware vsphere 5 and Microsoft hyper-V:

		For VMware vsphere 5	For Microsoft hyper-V
»	Type of hypervisor	Installed on the server without an operating system	Installed as a part of Windows Server 2008 R2 (Hyper-V)
»	Delivery options	Free edition of VMware or as a part of a commercial platform of VMware vsphere	Free product Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 on the base of Server Core or as a server Windows of 2008 server R2
»	Centralized control	VMware vCenter	System Center Virtual Machine Manager
»	The file system for storage of virtual machines	Cluster system VMFS, own development of VMware	Hybrid file system CSV, add-on NTFS
»	Clusters of high availability and fault tolerance	VMware High Availability	Clusters  Windows Server 2008 R2 and Virtual Machine Manager
»	Load balancing between host servers	VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler	Technology Performance Resource Optimization (PRO) from Microsoft and partners
»	Dynamic movement of virtual machines between physical servers without any downtime	VMware VMotion	Microsoft Live Migration
»	Dynamic movement of a storage for virtual machines	Storage VMotion (no downtime)	Quick Storage Migration (with the interruption of the virtual machine)
»	Backup	VMware Data Recovery and foreign products through interface VMware vstorage API. There is integration with the products of Symantec, HP, IBM, CA and others	Data Protection Manager 2007 R2, Data Protection Manager 2010, foreign solutions from Symantec, IBM, CA, etc.
»	Continuous availability for virtual machines in case of failure of equipment of the host server	Technology VMware Fault Tolerance	No
»	Deploying virtual machines with disks, increasing as the content data	VMware Thin Provisioning	With the help of partner products (such as Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V)

Despite the fact that virtualization means       of Microsoft technologically drop behind a little from VMware, they already have crucially important functions for many companies, first of all for small and medium businesses.
The positions of      VMware and Microsoft are quite clear: VMware is betting on virtual infrastructure, where the company has traditionally been strong, but Microsoft possessing with large resources is trying to expand business in all possible directions, using leadership in the market of operating systems and popular applications, and relying on the tight integration of various components of the platform.

Star Wars: Six key vendor battles in the future 

Battles between technology firms are never ending. If one ends, another begins. They invoke interest, create new jargons, and most importantly end in improving the products. Yes, battles are good, especially when they involve the who’s who.

Unified Communication

Cisco vs Micrsoft vs Polycom vs Avaya
Who wouldn’t want to be part of a thriving market? Unified communications, once a sole playground of Cisco, is now a hot target market for many. Competition is getting tougher for the networking giant in the UC space as companies like Microsoft and Avaya roll up their sleeves.
Microsoft and Cisco in fact compete and collaborate in this market. To be precise, their relationship can be called ‘co-opetition’. The story goes back to 2006, when Microsoft and Nortel formed the Innovative Communications Alliance. But after Nortel went bankrupt and ICA died, Microsoft went straight ahead and formed a UC alliance with HP -- Cisco’s networking and datacenter rival and in the process burning its bridges in a serious way.
While Microsoft and Cisco would definitely make for a watch-worthy game, UC and collaboration is the very raison d’etre for a company like Avaya. The competition between Cisco and Avaya, thus, is more serious. The most recent battlefield for the firms is tablet computers tailored specifically for enterprise collaboration and UC.
With the acquisition of Tanberg, Cisco is also competing directly with Polycom in the low-end and mid-range enterprise videoconferencing. Polycom, in turn, aligned itself with Cisco rivals IBM and Juniper to drive sales of its own videoconferencing systems along with IBM servers and storage systems and Juniper routers. With competition raving gradually, UC is going to be an interesting space to keep an eye on.

Battle for the Cloud

Microsoft Vs Red Hat

The cloud battlefield is a bit confusing as there are too many rivals who are not sure of who they are fighting with and for what. But there are two clear contenders who stand-out from the rest of the crowd -- Microsoft and Red Hat. In Red Hat’s own words -- There are only two companies that can provide a stack of cloud-enabled enterprise software, Red Hat and Microsoft. And the former is positioning its Cloud Foundations as an open source alternative to Microsoft’s Azure platform.
While Microsoft claims that it has designed Windows Azure grounds up to be the most open cloud platform available today, Red Hat begs to differ. It argues that Windows Azure requires that customers rewrite applications to use APIs that are specific to Microsoft’s hosted Azure service or large hosted services at a small number of Microsoft hosting partners. Red Hat, by contrast, enables customers to run applications written in their choice of language and framework across physical servers, virtualized environments, and private and public clouds, clarifies the vendor.
It has also gone one step further and submitted its cloud platform as a potential standard for interoperability. However, whether the open mantra alone will assure a happy ending for Red Hat is something that we need to wait and see. And discount Microsoft’s marketing potential at your own peril.

Datacenter

HP vs IBM vs Cisco
Competition in the datacenter space has been heating up for quite some time now and in the process many old friends have turned foes. Though the market was always competitive, one entry has definitely upset the apple cart. Cisco entered the server market with its ‘Unified Computing System’ in 2009 and started competing with its long-standing partners like HP and IBM. Though Cisco CEO John Chambers made it clear that the company would ‘focus not on competition, but where the market is going’, its move has definitely raised a few eyebrows in
the industry.
However, what it also did was to accelerate the industry’s move towards the concept of a converged infrastructure -- of offering everything that goes into a datacenter instead offering bits and pieces. As a knee-jerk reaction to Cisco’s UC architecture, HP launched its computing system named BladeSystem Matrix, exactly within a month. Though the vendor claimed that its architecture is completely a different concept from that of Cisco, the intention behind the launch seemed to be no different -- to be the leader in the fast and ever-growing data center market.
On the other side, IBM has made its move by getting very close to Cisco rivals Juniper and Brocade. IBM is OEMing switches and routers from both these companies and is trying to keep a safe distance from Cisco at every possible occasion. HP, on the other hand, refused to even acknowledge Cisco as a competitor. But who would emerge as a winner seems to be a tough thing to predict.

Virtual Reality

VMware vs Citrix

 
The rivalry between Citrix and VMware in the virtualization space is not new for anybody. Over the years, it has been getting tougher and at the same time newer. Both the companies have been fighting over new topics every time. It started with VMware clearly becoming the leader in the server virtualization space with numbers that were way ahead of that of Citrix. At that stage, it clearly was one-horse race. However, as Citrix and Microsoft teamed up, things started changing.
It was then Citrix’s turn to top VMware in the desktop virtualization market. The former clearly had a lead in this space, though VMware badly tried to pull alongside. While Citrix claimed to have technical superiority in the desktop virtualization, VMware came back with a ‘we invented VDI’ story.
The battle between the two has now moved to a different level -- to the cloud. Though VMware seems to be more aggressive about pushing its ‘virtualization as a path to cloud’ story to customers, Citrix seems to be equally excited about its Cloud App Delivery. The role that these two companies will play in accelerating the cloud adoption is definitely going to be worth a watch.

Lync 2010 and Office Communicator 2007: Which is better?

Lync 2010 communication software program of Microsoft brings together several improvements with the same capabilities that Office Communicator 2007 of Microsoft has in addition to Microsoft Live Meeting 2007 of Microsoft office. This also mounts several new and exciting attributes.
Now let us see the new attributes and added features of Lync 2010.

It’s so easy:

Now your office transmission tools can be unified and became available. Switching of programs became unnecessary now. Easy filters will assist you:
1. Search contact within the Contacts list.
2. You can now sustain with the latest from your contacts; some examples are, office moves or private notes in the list of  Feeds.
3. Manage several interactions as well as consider recent versions, in the Interactions list.
4. View the snail mail, in addition to utilize a pad of dialing.
Lync 2010 integrates the most beneficial top features of social networking to support getting the work executed within these kind of areas:

• Mailing as well as receiving direct messages.
• Making calls over phone or online video calls through your computer.
• Taking part in interactive on-line conference.

Personal Area:

You can always change your personal information in the upper portion of your Lync’s central window. Those information may become visible with all your contacts. To utilize the “Me Area”:

1. Update your recent status:

If you are on a meeting, over the phone, if you are away from your computer, or you can also set your status to off work when you have to go home sometimes, Lync can keep the record of your availability. Your contacts may notice your updated status in a glance through the red, green and yellow color indicators.

2. Post a private note:

You can always present your status to your contacts whether or not it is business-related or only for fun. You can even post a web tackle, in which your contacts can certainly click on to visit.
3. Customize your existing snapshot:
This is another exciting feature of Lync 2010 wherein you can alter the default photo with your own customized snapshot. But this is only if the organization allows the changes and you can always choose one from a website such as Windows Live network of Internet services.

4. Indicate your own area:

In any case, you may need to set your current location by stating your road number, building or the name of your city you are staying.

These feature is not available in Office Communicator 2007.

Enhancement of Contact List:

You can be able to see your contact’s information such as the company name and custom photos regarding of the rapid identification as well as modifying the method the you presented to your contacts.

The common contacts will be the ten contacts you normally get with the Lync interactions (not always essentially the most recent). Lync pre-populates this specific group of contact together with your team members.

You can also pin your selected contacts at the top of Frequent contacts by simply right-clicking their names and then clicking Pin to Frequent Contacts. You may need to point a contact in order to receive rich information regarding the person or distribution group. You can now start communicating from your contact card and your contacts list. And when you expand your card, the contact’s organization is also included.
This is a better replacement from the old Office Communicator 2007. By then, you can now be able to get more fresh and modern techniques to get in touch with people through Lync 2010.

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