Is VMware losing its hold over its third-party software ecosystem?

VMworld is only a week away. For virtualization enthusiasts, this has been the must-see show for years, and that doesn’t seem to be changing. I’ve always enjoyed the show’s large solution exchange where VMware, its partners, and competitors from around the globe come together under one roof to show off their virtualization wares.

This year’s show in Las Vegas should be no different, except that attendees can expect more and more third-party vendors to become multi-hypervisor capable and to support heterogeneous virtualization and cloud environments rather than focusing support on VMware alone. VMware is still the big dog on campus — this is its show, after all; but the word “heterogeneous” will be thrown around as each vendor tries to differentiate itself from VMware’s software management stack.

[ Also on InfoWorld.com: Five vSphere 5.0 enhancements that you may have missed because of the vSphere licensing changes | And read how Altaro readies a Hyper-V backup tool for small businesses. | Keep up-to-date on virtualization by signing up for InfoWorld’s Virtualization newsletter. ]

One of the companies I recently spoke with, VMTurbo, earlier this month added support for Microsoft Hyper-V into its virtualization and cloud management software and will be showing off this new version at VMworld.

The company’s solution focuses on items such as infrastructure monitoring, performance reporting, problem detection, and capacity reporting. The latest release added a number of new enhancements, such as updates for its policy builder, improvements to its user interface, support for automated VM configurations in response to VMTurbo performance recommendations, email notification policy enhancements, as well as automated storage vMotion updates. VMTurbo added two other cool new template capabilities: one to help with the price/performance benefit analysis between two different hardware vendors and the other to help simulate the work load of various VMs with application stacks that may not currently exist in inventory.

But according to VMTurbo, no capability has generated as much interest as the release of Hyper-V compatibility. Instead of supporting multiple instances of one brand of hypervisor, the company has extended its platform offerings to include heterogeneous environments. From a single pane of glass, VMTurbo says it can provide its customers with visibility and insight into a diverse infrastructure, something that more companies are beginning to ask their IT staff to manage.

“I think ISVs are recognizing that there’s lots of value to be added in the Hyper-V space, including in virtual infrastructure management,” said Jeff Byrne, senior analyst with the Taneja Group. “System Center is solid in its physical infrastructure management capabilities, but it’s still playing a bit of catch-up in managing virtual environments. The upcoming System Center VMM release will help close some of those gaps, but there is still plenty of opportunity for value-add in VI-specific performance management and real-time analytics.”

VMTurbo seems to agree with the Taneja Group findings, which is why it’s added Hyper-V support to its platform. But what’s interesting is the company not only sees a growing market for heterogeneous virtual environments but also a growing Hyper-V-only market.

“‘Conventional wisdom’ is that most Hyper-V deployments are in heterogeneous environments — shops running VMware and Hyper-V,” said Ilya Mirman, vice president of marketing at VMTurbo. “So we found it interesting that as soon as we release a product for Hyper-V, literally the same day, we saw numerous requests for the Hyper-V-only installation package — that is, VMTurbo for use in a Hyper-V-only environment –[which is] a testament to the fact that there indeed are more and more organizations using strictly Hyper-V.”

Byrne says they are seeing a growing number of accounts using multiple hypervisors, and Hyper-V is often used in those environments. He also suspects that Hyper-V is growing as a primary hypervisor in traditional Windows strongholds, especially in midmarket deployments.

“Hyper-V has closed most of the functionality gaps between itself and vSphere. And while it’s still lagging somewhat, it offers the core virtualization and administrative features that a majority of mid-market and also many enterprise customers are looking for,” said Byrne. “Hyper-V’s low price [bundled with Windows Server] has also helped it to gain share and momentum.”

Byrne said it was still too early to tell whether VMware’s vSphere 5 licensing changes would have any effect on Microsoft’s ability to grab additional server virtualization market share away from VMware. “Most VMware accounts are not moving to vSphere 5 right away, and most are pretty locked in to VMware technology at this point. I suspect that the drama around vSphere 5 licensing will help all VMware competitors somewhat, but we probably won’t begin to see any real impact until the first half of next year.”

In the meantime, third-party ecosystem companies like VMTurbo will continue to expand and support other hypervisor platforms beyond the current virtualization market leader. For years, VMware has had the benefit of a bit of a monopoly on third-party application support in the world of virtualization. For startups, especially, it didn’t make sense to spend a lot of money and effort creating products around a virtualization platform that didn’t have a strong customer base — you go where the money is, and that was with VMware.

However, with more customers choosing either a heterogeneous environment or making a switch to alternative platforms such as Hyper-V, ecosystems and third-party applications are evolving and branching out. (The fact that VMware is also building or buying competing solutions that go up against many of its own partners probably has something to do with that as well.) And one way to differentiate yourself from VMware’s competing management products is to be multi-hypervisor capable.

“I’ve recently learned that at least one other notable VMware-only management ISV will be introducing a Hyper-V offering for the first time at VMworld, so we could be seeing a bit of a trend here,” said Byrne. “Microsoft appears to be investing more strongly in these types of ISV relationships than it has in the past, so that’s a significant plus, too.”

VMTurbo currently comes in three editions: Community, which provides infrastructure monitoring, problem detection and historical reporting is free; Enterprise Operations Manager, which adds real-time optimization and capacity planning at $25 per month per socket or $5 per month per VM; and Cloud Operations Manager, which can manage multiple data centers and cloud environments at $49 per month per socket or $9 per month per VM.

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