Microsoft beefs up virtualisation portfolio

Microsoft has unveiled System Center Virtual Machine Manager

Microsoft has substantially beefed up its virtualisation support with the official unveiling of System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

The company has also released a new server virtualisation product, and an updated version of its tools for delivering virtual applications to client systems.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 enables firms to centrally deploy and manage virtual machines running on Microsoft's own virtual server platforms or those of VMware.

The product is designed to offer capabilities approaching that of VMware's server management tools. It will be released within the next 30 days.

Also announced is Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, a standalone server virtualisation tool that enables firms to consolidate Windows and Linux workloads onto a single physical server.

Hyper-V Server 2008 will be available to download at no cost within the next 30 days, Microsoft said.

Microsoft has also demonstrated for the first time the live migration of workloads between servers running Windows Server 2008 R2, and said that this capability will be added to the next version of Hyper-V Server.

“Now is the time for customers that haven’t tried virtualisation yet to begin looking at deploying it,” said Mike Schutz, Microsoft director of product management for Windows Server.

He added that virtualisation is under-utilised at the moment, and that Microsoft is addressing this by making virtual machine infrastructure easier to use.

“The goal with System Center Virtual Machine Manager is to help customers manage physical and virtual machines from a single pane of glass. We are well set up to do that,” he said.

Microsoft unveiled Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008 in June, but it has lacked vital management support until now. Experts believe that Microsoft might soon have capabilities to match those of virtualisation leader VMware, while being able to beat it on price.

“If you want to virtualise Windows, you still need Windows licences. Microsoft has the ability to offer a more compelling price point,” said Chris Ingle of research firm IDC. This is because Microsoft can offer its product for little or no extra cost above that of Windows itself.

However, Ingle added that performance will also prove a key factor in the datacentre. “Enterprises will be interested in the overheads of Hyper-V versus those of VMware, and we just don’t know enough about that yet,” he said.

In a related move, Microsoft last week released to manufacturing Application Virtualisation 4.5, the latest version of its SoftGrid product for deploying applications without installing them.

The new version adds greater flexibility in how applications are deployed, including a more lightweight delivery infrastructure and the option to deploy without streaming from a server.