Not really a long one by my standards, but the latest Gartner research into x86 virtualisation is an interesting read (for a change):

http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1GJA88J&ct=130628&st=sb

Basically, comparing the YoY Magic Quadrants we see:

This shows arbirtarily, that Microsofts ability to execute, and its “completeness of vision” have both increased, whereas VMware’s has held (which is sometimes as good as a gain if your the leader).

Thoughts

What i tend to see when speaking with customers, colleagues or friends at other large SI’s is that it rarely breaks down to function in terms of virtualization (para, at least) – within reason. Previously it used to be “I want VMotion functionality, so i need to have VMware and pay for it” – whereas now Hyper-V has “live migration” (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831435.aspx). So thats functionality ticked off.

What i have seen, is that it boils down to price. In this apparent age of austerity, i’ve seen full “MS Shops” (Windows desktops, Servers, MS Communicator, Lync, SCCM/SCOM) move onto Hyper-V to align their technical portfolio –  as unsuprisingly, Hyper-V running with VMM, AD, GPO, along with Windows Server, is all very nicely aligned (one thing i will happily concede about MS).

However, in companies that have disperate environments, i still find that VMware is the prevelant technology – this could be for a whole raft of reasons. Having sys admins who out of principle wont use MS (those who dont want MS and will use LDAP instead of AD out of principle, Zimbra instead of Exchange, etc).

Also, those sys admins may like to work at the CLI more than the GUI – and from when I used to use VMware daily, the CLI was much more feature rich than powershell.

Finally – VMware may be incumbent and setup and ticking along nicely already, so there is no real motivating factor to move platform – cost of purchase is small compared to cost of migration, down time, retraining, etc.

So those are my very high level thoughts on the battle – agree, disagree, dont care? 🙂