A while back Microsoft suprised some in the industry by taking the unusually pragmatic approach of supporting the Novell SUSE Linux under Hyper-V. This week they have gone a step further by extending suport to one of the most common commercial Linux platforms Red Hat a platform that was often pitched as the successor to Windows Server.
Really this should come as no surprise - Microsoft are secure in their market position. According to IDC in the tail end of 2009 over 50% of servers delivered as a VM or virtualised workload were Microsoft Windows Server 2008, and I don;t see Citrix doing a lot of Apple Desktop virtualisation, it's all Windows. By expanding the range of supported guest OS's and giving it away for free, Microsoft will continue to take marketshare as organisations new to virtualisation (or not keen on spending on VMWare licenses) will undoubtedly try if not take the easy option.
By starting to support the linux community Microsoft are setting the stage. Making it easy to quickly expanding the number of ISV delivered applications for provisioning, management, HA, DR, security et al. that are needed to setup run a successful virtualised datacenter. Applications up to now only available for VMware
Microsoft have history here - in the mid '90's companies like FTP, Woolongong & Sunsoft had a very nice business selling TCP/IP stacks for PC's, until Microsoft introduced the Winsock API, which allowed every ISV with an terminal emulator or printing app to access Microsofts own free-to-download product - all three companies disappeared in one way or another over the next 4 years. I'd also contend that it led to the demise of Netscape - but that's another story.
So todays VMYak 'take-away' is - Remember, whilst VMware has hundreds of thousands of customers for VMWare - Microsoft has millions customers of Windows server out there. Windows Server is in almost every service provider, commercial organisation and public agency in world, and for them virtualization is just a free download away.
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