The first beta of Hyper-V was made available at Christmas last year so everybody has gotten a good look at Hyper-V. Microsoft itself, naturally, has the utmost confidence in their hypervisor and in the good spirit of eating ones own dog food have leveraged Hyper-V to host all the web server hosting the Technet and MSDN Websites. So Microsoft already has an interesting reference customer: themselves.

As you probably all know, Hyper-V is going to be a steal a $28 and it puts the (financial) pressure on VMware. In my day job working at Quest's Provision Networks division I deal with a lot of different hypervisors frequently (this is because the Provision Networks Virtual Access Suite supports all the major hypervisors including Hyper-V). With that I often get into discussions with customers and colleagues about which hypervisor is best. The ancient answer to that question in my mind still remains "it depends". However, it is clear to see that Vmware currently has the most mature hypervisor and their market penetration supports this fact. Another fact is that their current pricing is a result of this market dominance. Just looking at it objectively, without focusing on the technical nitty-gritty details will lead me to say (and this is my personal opinion) that people will use Hyper-V. In fact, thousands of companies will adopt Hyper-V. In the end (let's say 3 to 5 years from now) VMware will have their work cut out for them. Why? Is it because VMware has a lousy commercial strategy? Is it because Microsoft has the better technology? It is because Microsoft is teaming with Citrix on this as well? No. I think there's two main reasons. One is very simple: just because Microsoft is Microsoft. If it is a Microsoft product people will use it. The speed at which this adaptation will occur will depend on a multitude of factors but fact of the matter is that all this hypervisor needs is the "made by Microsoft" label. That's just the way it is. A second reason that will make people "try and buy" Hyper-V is the fact that Hyper-V does hypervisoring the Windows way. By this I mean that Hyper-V does not have the strict hardware requirements (except for the 64 bit part) that VMware has. If you want to quickly test ESX you need to be a brain surgeon with the associated salary to find the right hardware to test it with. With Hyper-V is pretty easy: if it works with Windows, it will work with Hyper-V. Of course a consequence of this approach will be that Hyper-V will never be as stable or safe as ESX is but that's worth the risk in my book.

In any case it will be interesting to see how Hyper-V will be adopted and at what speed and how it will affect VMware. Time will tell. I just read that BMW already has decided on Hyper-V as their hypervisor of choice. Hyper-V will be available via Windows Update on July 8 but is already available for direct download here.

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