How Will VMware Respond to RemoteFX in Hyper-V?
VMware announced several upcoming features in its next generation virtualization infrastructure vSphere 5 at Partner Exchange this month. While the announced features are cool and were sort of expected, I was hoping to see what vSphere 5 was going to offer as a competitive edge to Microsoft’s integration of RemoteFX with Hyper-V.
Microsoft back in January released Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. As part of this release, Hyper-V received a “nitro” boost with the integration of RemoteFX. This is huge for many reasons.
First, RemoteFX now allows you to have greater control and more direct access to the Graphics Processing Unit, which will allow you to virtualize more servers that may have not been candidates for virtualization. But more importantly, RemoteFX is huge for virtual desktop infrastructure, as it significantly enhances the user experience.
How will VMware respond and when? Can VMware extend support for RemoteFX in vSphere 5? Is that even possible from a licensing perspective? Or will VMware just follow Microsoft and integrate PCoIP into ESX?
Since the majority of workloads being virtualized are Windows servers and desktops, VMware would be better served supporting RemoteFX at the hypervisor level. While thus far, the majority of virtualized workloads, servers and desktops are still on vSphere, in order for VMware to maintain the pole position, it has to extend this type of support to RemoteFX. Otherwise, virtualizing desktops could potentially become an area where Microsoft -- and Citrix, for that matter -- can chip away at VMware’s lead in the hypervisor space.
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 02/22/2011 at 12:49 PM