VMware Prohibits Hyper-V Demonstrations at VMworld 2009

This week in San Francisco, CA was the annual virtualization conference VMworld; a gathering for virtualization enthusiast hosted by VMware. The conference has been known for years as the select industry conference where all things virtual come to play and show how virtualization is shaping technology as we know it and how it plans to transform IT in the future.

I had the pleasure of participating in the conference as a guest of Microsoft working side-by-side with members of the Microsoft Virtualization Product Team. Members of this team are well known through-out the industry as the best and brightest on topics surrounding virtualization. I along with Ben Armstrong, Edwin Yuen, Vijay Tewari and others had the opportunity to speak to attendees about the capabilities and benefits of using Microsoft virtualization, especially Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager in the virtual datacenter. However, this year was much different than before as VMware decided that it would prohibit Microsoft from demonstrating any demos of any Microsoft virtualization product at the conference. VMware stated that this was a result of “shenanigans” demonstrated by Microsoft during last year’s VMware conference in Las Vegas, NV. If this is the case, then why was Citrix prohibited as well? They didn’t participate in the so called “Microsoft shenanigans”. I have a different view; I expect this may have something to do with the recent reports of Microsoft taking 24% of the virtualization market share by the IDC earlier this year, showing that Hyper-V is indeed a real competitor and/or threat in the virtual enterprise. Even thou there were no demo’s of any of the Microsoft virtualization products, we were available to answer many questions by attendees and in many cases found that attendees felt mislead in the functionality currently available in Hyper-V and VMM by others when comparing VMware to Hyper-V.

Beyond the restrictions enforced on Microsoft and Citrix during this year’s event, I felt the let down’s continued beyond the exhibit hall. I didn’t see anything presented at any of the sessions that I felt really gave any VMware customers anything new to look forward to. But, fortunately for Microsoft customers there is a lot to be counting on with the RTM’s of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Systems Center Virtual Machine Manger 2008 R2. I could be wrong, but I think with all the good things that Microsoft is doing in the virtualization space; we could be reading future reports by the IDC that Microsoft has gained a much greater percentage of the virtualization market share in the near future.