During Microsoft Management Summit 2008, Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, outlined the company's dynamic datacenter strategy. Part of Microsoft's strategy is to expand its virtualization capabilities and to deliver automated management of heterogeneous IT environments. "At Microsoft we are helping redefine what it means to do IT management in the enterprise with th During Microsoft Management Summit 2008, Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, outlined the company’s dynamic datacenter strategy. Part of Microsoft’s strategy is to expand its virtualization capabilities and to deliver automated management of heterogeneous IT environments.“At Microsoft we are helping redefine what it means to do IT management in the enterprise with the new capabilities we are announcing today,” Muglia said. “By taking our knowledge of the Windows environment and expanding it to address heterogeneous management needs across platforms, applications, hardware and virtualization, we are opening up a new level of opportunity for companies to drive greater efficiency, responsiveness and value for their business.”Muglia got a positive response from the crowd for the announcement of Microsoft’s next version of Virtual Machine Manager. And well he should have. Microsoft is taking a different approach here than I think it would have only a few short years ago. Facing an uphill battle in the virtualization market for the past couple of years, the company is coming at the problem from another angle, management. The argument has been made by many, including myself, that the hypervisor is headed toward becoming commodity. Yes, blasphemy to many people, however, approaching virtualization from the management and application side seems to be a key positioning statement. And it is one that Microsoft is ready to make with Virtual Machine Manager. Microsoft wants to be the single pane of glass for managing virtualized and physical IT assets. So to reach that goal, the company is going to manage the physical assets as well as the virtual assets from its own hypervisor solution, Hyper-V, its hosted server virtualization platform, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, as well as virtualization platforms from its competitors, starting with VMware ESX.Out of the gate, VMM won’t be able to do everything that VMware VirtualCenter is capable of doing. So, there will be a few important gaps in the product from that perspective. However over time, in typical Microsoft fashion, the product will be enhanced and improved upon… the question will be how quickly, and how important are the missing components to the mass IT audience.Andi Mann, Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates, said that Microsoft understands the big picture here in a way that certain competitors don’t. “Firstly, Microsoft understands that the success or failure of virtualization deployments rests substantially on how well you are able to manage them. Secondly, Microsoft understands that this management must be heterogeneous, as virtualization tends overwhelmingly to involve multiple layers of complexity.”In EMA’s recent Q1/08 research report conducted with surveys of over 600 enterprises, findings showed that virtualization typically involves multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, UNIX, etc), multiple technologies (server virtualization, OS virtualization, application virtualization, desktop virtualization, cluster/grid computing, etc), and multiple vendors (VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, etc). The report found that 60% of enterprises planned to deploy server virtualization products from multiple vendors, and in general, over 90% of virtualization deployments will involve multiple platforms, technologies and vendors. Only 2% said they would deploy virtualization with just one platform, one technology and one vendor.So perhaps Microsoft is right on the money with this one? Mann brought up a good point while discussing the need for heterogeneous management, saying that if you cannot manage this complex heterogeneous environment, and these multiple layers of complexity, you risk human errors, increased downtime, rising costs, internal political problems, skill shortages, and more. This is a critical part of virtualization success, and “Microsoft is answering this requirement in a way that very few competitors are, least of all VMware.”Microsoft has a long way to go to reach feature parity with VMware’s hypervisor product. But it looks like this new management approach to the dynamic datacenter might put Microsoft in a good position. Mann summed it up best for me by saying, “Who would have thought that Microsoft, of all people, would look to win the virtualization battle with a heterogeneous solution?” Beta software for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 is now available for download. You can also find out more information about the product on Microsoft’s Website or their System Center blog site. Software Development