Virtualization wars: The empire strikes back

How do you see Hyper-V aiding in the reduction of energy consumption when it can only consolidate Windows-based servers?

O'Rourke: There's no greater way for customers to reduce power consumption than to consolidate the number of servers being used, and obviously Hyper-V will be used to do that. Beyond that, Windows Server 2008 provides customers features and technologies, some of which were not available in Windows Server 2003, that will help to reduce the power consumption of server and client operating systems, minimize environmental by-products, and increase server efficiency. Download the white paper here.

Shields: Again, there's a sizable percentage of environments that are mostly Microsoft-based. It was reported yesterday that virtualization as a generic solution only has a 10 percent penetration so far. That leaves a lot of Microsoft servers (and a lot of all kinds of servers) that can still be virtualized.

Microsoft has been criticized for not being able to scale and grow with its customers. How do you address that?

O'Rourke: In fiscal 2007, Microsoft reported revenue of $51 billion, 12 percent growth, R&D investment of nearly 13 percent of revenue, more than 78,000 employees in 103 countries. Given that, I'm sure Microsoft can scale and grow with our customers.

Shields: Check out Hyper-V. This product is designed to scale. As an example, the MSDN and TechNet Web sites have both been running atop Hyper-V for a number of weeks now. This entails a lot of servers getting hit a lot of times - 4 million hits per day, to be precise - and is a brilliant move on the part of Microsoft in proving its product.

How do you plan to manage physical infrastructure with Hyper-V?

O'Rourke: Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is a hypervisor, not a systems management tool. For management, customers can use System Center to configure, deploy, operate and backup both virtual and non-virtualized applications and operating systems. And customers can use the beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to manage VMs running within Hyper-V, Virtual Server 2005, or VMs running within VMware ESX Server.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 tightly integrates with System Center Operations Manager [SCOM] 2007 to deliver a new feature called Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO). SCOM 2007 identifies opportunities for more efficient physical and virtual resource allocation and generates PRO tips within the Virtual Machine Manager console. Administrators can implement these PRO tips and dynamically optimize their datacenter based upon pre-defined policies and the real-time, changing demands of users. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 is scheduled to be released in early Q4 this year.

Shields: I think Patrick said it all.

Microsoft has come out of the gate strong, if also a little later than others -- but it has the reputation of catching up fast. What's your opinion? Have any other questions for the folks at Microsoft?