Microsoft Mythbusters Top 10 VMware Myths

I had just read through some articles and watch the video from Microsoft about the top 10 VMware Myths today, I would like to share my thoughts about the video details published by Microsoft with unbiased opinions.

The guys talked about Live Migration on HyperV on the next release. As a customer, I am always believed that the software provider should only commit and tell the customers when their products are ready, and not always tell the customer WE ARE READY IN THE NEXT RELEASE. This only explain as your product is not ready, what about your next release is in 2 years time? That meant the products is not as promise as you publish to the customers. Please take note that VMware had supported Storage VMotion for current version, which is another step beyond of Live Migration.

Cluster File system from Microsoft today will be far behind if we compare with the fault tolerance in vSphere. This is only able to match with what VMware had been done in the pass and not creating new technology into their product. They should take more innovative to come out something that VMware doesn't.

HyperV is not scalable as VMware does? This could be right depend how you want this to be compared. In virtual infrastructure, HA and DRS are both important pieces in the production environment which promise the load balancing and High availability. ESX 3.5 support up to 32 ESX host per clusters, which I think HyperV is not comparable at all. I think HyperV is far behind in term of the technology which customers are demanding. They may able to target the crowd which plan for development, test and training environment to be virtualized on HypverV, but not mission critical production systems. You can easily run 1000 of web server in the front end without HA or clustering to serve your web site today, with additional load balancer in the market which auto redirect the traffic to the servers, therefore when 100 / 1000 servers are down, and your web should still reachable. There is nothing should be proud to tell the customer how many Virtual Machine from Hyper V is currently running the Microsoft website. To run a web server in virtual machine today, is very common and not big deal at all.

About reliability, if we compare the system uptime for Linux and windows, which machine will we rebooted most and patch it most? I think you and myself should have the right answer in the mind. Even if VMware is utilizing the similar amount of resource to power up the ESX, but do remember, VMware perform smartly in term of resources management. It will smartly manage the resources to give the maximum utilization of the hardware you invested, plus higher ratio of consolidation. Of course, it does provide flexibilities to reserve the right amount of resources if require.

HyperV has the advantage to run on any hardware you like. This is something that VMware does not provide, as we are required to follow the HCL from VMware for each version of ESX we deploy. In most case, will we actually run our production virtual infrastructure to serve business need on a custom made server? or a mixture parts from multiple vendor which didn't fully tested of compatible purpose? Most customers today will buy the servers from DELL, HP, IBM and etc, which provide the best compatible from technology from motherboards, memory, CPU, storage and etc, which had been certified and tested before they sell to the customers. This had significant improved the server life spend and productivity. Therefore, I will conclude this advantages from HyperV does not really concern myself to select them as the hypervisor in our data center.

Management wise, I think they are trying to over sell their system center, which is a big step to lock customers down to their so call SCCM for everything in your environment. Why will you need to have pure microsoft to run in your organization while there are plenty of products available to be more reliable, cheaper and efficient. In our environment, we are trying to avoid to run Microsoft as much as possible due to the costly licensing term they apply to the customers. We run 85% of our system in Linux environment today, and I should said SCCM is not the right tools to manage my physical or virtual environment. If you want me to choose between Altiris and SCCM, Altiris might be a better choice to myself. SCCM may meant more to the pure Microsoft platform environment usage.

There are certainly more comments I can put here regarding the video I watched, but I think is just too tired to write up everything here. I think you guys who read this should have your personal opinion. My thought here is meant for share and more towards my environment. You may think differently from myself as the environment that you run may be different. Enjoy the video.