News

Microsoft COO: We 'Ate VMware's Lunch'

• By Keith Ward
• 07/15/2014

Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner was in full preacher mode at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington, D.C., yesterday, offering to "baptize" partners who have yet to embrace that old-time Hyper-V religion.

He also told attendees during a keynote that Hyper-V "ate VMware's lunch," putting up a slide that showed Hyper-V's rising market share since the release of Windows Server 2012. It claimed that since the third quarter of 2012, Hyper-V has grabbed 4.6 percent more market share of the hypervisor market, and now sits at 30.6 percent, compared to 46.4 percent for ESXi, the VMware hypervisor. That's a decline of 5.1 percent from its high of 51.5 percent in the same time frame.

Turner wasn't done bashing Redmond's rival, though. He also said that Hyper-V is four times cheaper than VMware, and that it is technologically superior. "Come on, we'll get you all down the front and we'll get you baptized today," he reportedly said.

The slide also showed the growth of Hyper-V, starting from zero share in the first quarter of 2008 when Windows Server 2008 was released, to where it sits today at 30.6 percent. The slide showed that during the same period, ESX also gained 6.3 percent in total, going from 40.1 percent to 46.4 percent.

VMware responded that Microsoft is using selective data to make its claims. Eric Horschman, director of product marketing at VMware, said in an e-mail, "With regard to the market share claims, market share should be computed using installed base and not quarterly shipments. If we look at market share from that perspective, VMware is clearly the market leader."

Horschman added: "According to IDC, VMware's market share stands at 56 percent in comparison to Microsoft at 26.4 percent for Q4 2013 (market share by installed based using IDC Server Virtualization Tracker)."

He also took issue with Microsoft's claim of lower costs. "Microsoft considers only software costs in their comparisons," Horschman said. "That is only one part of the equation and ignores the significant costs of:

• The physical infrastructure to support the VM population -- this is where VMware's greater efficiencies from better memory management, better VM load balancing pay off by enabling customers to run at higher VM densities than with Hyper-V.
• Operational Expenses -- this is where the 80 percent to 90 percent lower Operational Expenditures (opex), as validated by independent testing, for vSphere and vCloud Suite offers customers tremendous savings compared to Hyper-V and System Center.
• Greater capabilities and features -- to bring a private cloud based on Hyper-V and System Center up to parity with vCloud Suite, customers would need to add several third-party components to match the more sophisticated management, disaster recovery, backup, and network virtualization capabilities of the vCloud Suite. Those software costs will substantially boost costs of a Microsoft platform."

The WPC continues through Thursday.