VMware vCenter Now Manages Microsoft Hyper-V
Is VMware starting to feel the heat from Microsoft's Hyper-V, or is the release of VMware vCenter XVP Manager a master's stroke at containing the competition?
If you have not heard yet, VMware recently released vCenter XVP Manager and Converter, a plugin for vCenter that allows you to manage Hyper-V from the same centralized console. VMware hit two birds with one stone. On the one hand, VMware is secretly admitting that Hyper-V deployments are taking place and that they have to deal with it. On the other hand, VMware is also using this tool as a way of winning back these deployments.
The way to look at it is, if users are using Hyper-V via the vCenter console, they are already a bit biased towards VMware and if by using this tool they feel that Hyper-V is not doing what they expect, the conversion process is automatically built into this tool. It's brilliant; VMware is playing defense and offense.
Now on to the technical stuff, the vCenter XVP Manager and Converter can manage the following flavors of Microsoft Hyper-V:
- Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V Role
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V Role
VMware is positioning this tool as a cross-platform virtualization management tool and I would not be surprised if the tool expanded to support different flavors of Xen and KVM. This approach reflects a maturity in the VMware thought process and also a sense of reality. There will be different hypervisors in an organization, so instead of fighting it, VMware seems be embracing it intelligently and competing on features. May the best hypervisor win.
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 03/01/2011 at 12:49 PM