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More on VMWare/Microsoft War of Words: Page 2 of 3

In our news analysis section, we detail sparring by VMWare and Microsoft over the future of virtualization. Software licensing is going to have to change in the age of virtualization. Who's got it right, Microsoft or its upstart rivals? Our...
March 01, 2007

And what about this whole Vista's licensing thing where you can't legally run it in a Virtual Machine? The reason behind that is ... what, exactly, Mr. Microsoft?

Then there's the logical sparring: If you figure Xen, Novell, and Microsoft are in one corner (logical, given the recent announcements) who should logically be in the other corner? VMware and ... RedHat?

So I buy VMware with my Dell/HP/IBM/etc. servers now--what OS I run in the VM is an afterthought. So do standards, licensing, and which OS ships with my hardware matter? Yeah, I think they do. - Greg Shipley, NWC Contributing Editor

Besides the obvious load balancing of similar (Citrix, Web, etc. servers) across multiple hosts there are many applications that have seasonal (weekly, monthly etc.) busy periods that can be stacked 8 deep on a physical machine outside the busy period. One client of mine has a data warehouse that gets shifted to its own DL585 for the weekly data load and cube build and shifted back to share a server.

The building of virtual machine images that won't run under VMware and preventing the modification of MS format VM images to VMware format are just petty little games that annoy the customers and demonstrate that MS sometimes takes the competition too far letting things that won't really slow VMware down annoy customers. - Howard Marks, NWC Contributing Editor

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