At this past VMworld 2011 Sean Deuby, Jeff James and I met with Edwin Yuen, Director Cloud and Virtualization Strategy for Microsoft. One of the things that became clear from Edwin as well as from the keynotes VMware’s Paul Martiz and Steven Herrod is that both VMware and Microsoft believe that we are at a critical inflection point in the evolution of IT. The pervading belief from both of these companies is that regarding the cloud it’s not of question of if but rather of when. However, there are big differences in how the different companies approach both the cloud and virtualization for that matter. While most businesses may not be ready to adopt the cloud now is the time to carefully evaluate these different cloud options.
Edwin pointed out that although both VMware and Microsoft have cloud offerings there are many key differences in each company’s approach both in terms of economic repercussions as well as in terms of features and basic orientation. Edwin pointed out the VMware’s new licensing with vSphere 5 has changed and can be significantly more expensive than Microsoft’s because with VMware you pay more as your needs scale up. In addition, Edwin pointed out that VMware is very infrastructure focused but in the long run it’s really about the applications and that Microsoft’s System Center products provides deeper application monitoring than VMware’s solutions. For instance, Microsoft’s Exchange and SQL Server management packs provide deeply integrated application management and health monitoring for these critical applications that isn’t present in vSphere.
You can learn more about the difference in Microsoft’s and VMware’s licensing differences for the private cloud in the following white paper:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/private-cloud/default.aspx
