More on VMWare/Microsoft War of Words: Page 3 of 3

Perhaps this is just the opening salvo of what???s going to turn into a battle royale between VM, OS and application vendors over licensing rights. The increasing use of VM???s ??? and even multi-core processors ??? are straining licensing designed for the antiquated one machine, one OS, one application model, and the industry as a whole hasn???t made much progress in addressing these problems even though everyone knows they exist. Is VMware correct in saying that Microsoft is being heavy-handed in their handling of the use and licensing of their newest products? Sure ??? so what else is new? This strategy has served them well in the past, given the fact that they own both the OS and the key desktop applications that run on them. Is it legal? Apparently the government has found it so. Is it unreasonable? Hmmm???

Though the bigger issue is still the licensing of applications and OS???s across virtualization vendors, the big flap here is about the limitations that Microsoft has imposed on the use of the first generation of pre-configured, Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) images of their Windows Server 2003, Exchange Server 2007 and SQL Server 2005 products released as a ???test-drive??? download. These free, evaluation VHD???s were released to allow companies to test them in context of a Windows Virtual Server 2003 R2 environment. Of course this is a move to get companies to take a closer look at Microsoft???s virtualization capabilities ??? but is it wrong that they???ve limited the use of these evaluation VHD???s to Virtual Server? Perhaps not.

As of today, VMware is pretty much dominating the virtualization market so it???s understandable that they would be concerned about the restrictions Microsoft has placed on these evaluation images. And from a customer???s point of view it would certainly be better to be able to compare these applications using both VMware and Microsoft VMs, or even with Xen for that matter. But on the other hand, is it really fair to expect Microsoft to certify these images for use under other vendors VM environments? Not really. I???ve looked around and I don???t see an evaluation version of VMware???s VMotion product available for testing on other virtualization platforms either. As both an OS and key application vendor Microsoft will always be caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to such claims about unfair advantage, but this is a matter for the marketplace ??? and perhaps the courts ??? to decide. Business is business, and honestly, how much time of your day do you spend making life better for your competition? - Steven Hill, NWC Technology Editor