Interview: Microsoft UK virtualisation chief Neil Sanderson

Sanderson: Microsoft is seeing strong uptake of Hyper-V

Microsoft is a relative latecomer to virtualisation, at least in servers, but the firm has been making aggressive moves in the past few years to grab a larger share of the market. However, virtualisation is more than just about consolidating servers, and is also a key part of Microsoft's plans to build up its cloud computing strategy.

With last year's release of Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft has now integrated Hyper-V virtualisation support into its mainstream platform, a strategy that will be familiar to long-term industry observers, and one seemingly calculated to forestall customers from being drawn to VMware, the industry leader in this sector.

Neil Sanderson, product manager for virtualisation at Microsoft UK, said that Microsoft's approach lowers the entry cost for customers already using Windows, which is practically every organisation in the world, and is unabashed at the company's late entrance into the market.

"From a server point of view, we're coming into the market at a typical time for Microsoft, which is just as mainstream adoption is taking off. Generally, virtualisation has been used for specific projects, such as testing and development, but now we're seeing a big move from early adopter level to a much broader scale of adoption," he said.

One reason for this is that Microsoft now provides the functionality that customers want, according to Sanderson, including support for live migration of virtual machines, at lower cost and integrated into the Windows platform that most customers are already using.

"We see virtualisation as something to build infrastructure with. It's just another part of Windows, so it's a design choice in the way you build your infrastructure," he said.

And while Microsoft initially appeared to be targeting newcomers to virtualisation such as small businesses, Sanderson claimed that larger companies are also now turning to Hyper-V because of the potential savings.

"Those who have already invested in virtualisation, but are now looking to scale up, are looking at the cost and coming to us," he said.

If true, this could mean that Microsoft poses a bigger threat to VMware, which has so far dominated in the server virtualisation market, than many industry observers have judged.

Like VMware, Microsoft sees virtualisation as a building block for cloud computing, where the ability to manage a whole datacentre full of virtual machines and the services running on them becomes critical, something that Sanderson said is now addressed in Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager, launched last year.

"Virtualisation and management are key elements to developing both private and public clouds. The advantage of operating infrastructure as a private cloud is that you get fault tolerance, high availability and more of a service-oriented focus," Sanderson said.

But Sanderson claimed that Microsoft's approach to cloud computing is "much broader than other vendors'". He cited the company's Azure platform and cloud-based services such as SQL Azure and Business Productivity Online Suite as examples.

"I think there is consensus in the industry [about where cloud computing needs to go], but only Microsoft is able to invest across all the elements required for private clouds, services hosted for you, and services delivered through public clouds," he said.

Turning from the server to clients, Sanderson said there has been a lot of interest in client virtualisation over the past 18 months, especially from UK organisations.

However, Microsoft's vision for client virtualisation appears more focused on virtualising applications to make them easier to deploy and manage to the endpoint, rather than on virtualising the entire client, so-called virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

"I don't think VDI is the answer to reducing the cost of operating the desktop, at least not on its own, but it has its place," Sanderson said.

"We've seen a lot of interest in running the entire desktop session in the datacentre, but those customers who have looked closely at VDI have typically found that other forms of virtualisation do what they want with less investment. "

In particular, Microsoft's Application Virtualisation allows applications to be streamed from a server on demand rather than being installed to each Windows PC, simplifying desktop management and making it easier to deploy new applications if necessary, he said.

"But, as with server virtualisation, management is critical. Control and management of the entire client is important," he added.

End user experience is also a key area that cannot be overlooked, according to Sanderson.

"We found that users do not want to have to launch another platform once they have logged into Windows. They find that confusing," he said.

Overall, customers are likely to be using a mix of technologies in the near future, he concluded.

"There isn't going to be a massive shift to one new model of desktop provisioning. Customers will build solutions that are role-based, built around end-user needs. Choice is the great thing: choice between vendors and the choice of how to deliver it all," Sanderson said.