Since Microsoft released the public beta of Windows Server 8 with the new release of Hyper-V 3, I have been focusing some of my posts and thoughts on Hyper-V and have been really surprised at the amount of comments I have received. Take a look here, here and here to see the comments for yourself. Lines have been drawn and sides have been taken, which makes for quite a “spirited” debate.
These passionate “debates” really remind me of an earlier time in my career around the end of the 1990’s and early 2000’s. This was the time when the spirited debates were between the Microsoft teams and the Unix teams. Like most VMware administrators, I started my career as a Windows administrator and participated in some fun bantering back and forth with the UNIX and Linux teams over the years. Now over ten years later and there is a new feud between Microsoft and VMware. I have to give Microsoft some real credit in that most of technology debates have been Microsoft vs. some other technology like Citrix, VMware, Sun and Linux, to name a few.
It is very easy to get passionate about the technology that we use and make our livelihood from, but over the years there have always been technology sides and this trend will continue in the future so I propose that instead of focusing our energy on which technology is better, how about we focus on the fact that there will always be choices with technology and the real Holy Grail is having centralized management of our systems.
Think about it, what if you had one application for cross hypervisor management that you would use that had multiple tabs for each of the environments that we support. One tab could open the vCenter front end and another tab could open the connection to System Center and yet another tab for say, Citrix. How great would life be with true centralized control? Some tools exist already:
- Microsoft System Center with its ecosystem plugins
- Hotlink with its ability to use vCenter to manage Hyper-V, KVM, and XenServer
This is the topic that we all should be voicing our desire and opinion on together. This is my call to action for you all. We should voice this need at the top of our lungs in the hope that our words will be heard and will be acted upon. Forget what’s better and stay focused on how we make things work together and make our systems and datacenters a much better place. The fact is more and more organizations are using multiple hypervisors
Having real choice in the market is good for the customers and for the market as a whole. It drives competition and avoids the bad behavior that can come with too much market power concentrated in one place. It is also a sign of market maturity – you see it in storage and servers – many people have a primary vendor they use but most keep a second vendor in their shop to avoid lock-in and maintain those skills. At SolarWinds we have been hearing the demand for Hyper-V support and recently added it to the vSphere support in our product. Our customers have been telling us they want cross hypervisor management and we couldn’t agree more.
Full Disclosure: Mike Thompson, Director at SolarWinds