VMTN Blog: Why Choose VMware and Microsoft¡¦s Supposed Mythbusting

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I guess Newton’s law also applies on marketing. Microsoft recently published a video that supposedly debunks several so-called myths on Hyper-V. It did not take the blogging/twitter community long to respond and debunk Microsoft’s statements.

Why Choose VMware and Microsoft¡¦s Supposed Mythbusting

VMware started the Why Choose VMware portion of our website in 2^nd half 2008 as more and more vendors were coming on the scene, all claiming to offer products that do what VMware¡¦s solutions do. We felt it was necessary to tell our story, and to back up our claims with complete, academic evaluations of competing products. As such, The Why Choose VMware site shares six key reasons why we see VMware as offering a better solution compared to what others market. There¡¦s quite a lot of content there, but we tried to keep it as factually oriented as possible. For instance, the product comparison tables are lab-validated, based on our technical evaluations and comparisons of the products; they are not derived from just a cursory glance at vendor marketing literature.

Then this past week, we started getting inquiries about a Microsoft video that purports to bust the top ten ¡§myths¡¨ on Why Choose VMware. Others in the blogosphere have already responded.

• Gabe¡¦s Virtual World: When myth busting goes wrong and becomes a myth to bust it self
• vinternals: Microsoft Hyper-V 2.0 – NO Memory Overcommit!
• vCritical: Would you buy a hypervisor from these guys?

Ideally, we wouldn¡¦t have to pay much attention to this Microsoft video, but because we stand behind what we post on Why Choose VMware, we felt it was important for our customers and other companies looking to deploy VMware to hear directly from us. Again, we don¡¦t claim to be perfect and cannot say that we¡¦ll never have any errors on the site, but we will attempt to base everything we claim on a technical evaluation of a currently available product. Microsoft¡¦s answers to what it sees as ¡§myths¡¨ don¡¦t really even address factual errors – it¡¦s just more marketing rhetoric. Feel free to take a look at the video for yourself (click on the screen shot) and form your own opinion. Then below, we¡¦ll provide our response to each so-called ¡§myth.¡¨

When reviewing Microsoft¡¦s video, please also make sure to also check out the user comments ¡V they are pretty informative in regards to the ¡¥value¡¦ the video provided to customers (and Microsoft partners).

Read the full article for VMware’s response.

If you have some spare time on your hands after reading the Virtual Reality article and enjoy a good laughter head over to Vinternals. Stuart Radnidge provides you with the insights of where Microsoft obviously has a lot of catching up to do. The source of his article is a Microsoft Technet Article which describes the best practices and standards Microsoft’s IT department has developed.

Microsoft Myths and Realities…

In this paper, published January 2009, we get the cold hard facts on Hyper-V as deployed by none other than Microsoft IT themselves. Internally. Y¡¦know, that whole dogfood thing. And the results are absolutely astounding. Now before going further, I need to re-iterate this is an actual Microsoft published case. It is not an April Fools joke, they are not having a lend of us. It is stone cold truth from Microsoft¡¦s own IT department. If you were going to listen to anybody talk about the reality of Hyper-V, it¡¦s these guys. And again, this is not a joke. This is real. Here are a few juicy excerpts (bold bits added by me for emphasis):

As Microsoft IT developed standards for which physical machines to virtualize, it identified many lab and development servers with very low utilization and availability requirements. Because of the lower expectations, Microsoft IT now is deploying the lab and development virtual servers with four processor sockets, 16 to 24 processor cores, and up to 64 gigabytes (GB) of random access memory (RAM). These servers can host a large number of virtual machines, averaging 10.4 virtual machines per host machine.

A 16 core box, with somewhere north of 32GB RAM, could only take 10.4 ¡§development servers with very low utilization¡¨. Well if that¡¦s what they¡¦re doing for low utilisation boxes, I wonder how they fare for production machines.

URL: http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2009/04/why-choose-vmware-and-microsofts-supposed-mythbusting.html