Recently, an impromptu and unscientific study was conducted on the virtualization review, in order to address an issue that many companies have to deal with as their need for virtualization grows – would they be willing to sacrifice some functionality in order to achieve cost savings on a hypervisor?
The survey came after an off-hand comment by a reader, who had committed themselves entirely to using Microsoft’s Hyper-V solution. In a virtual world currently dominated by VMware when it comes to hypervisors, this seemed odd. When asked, the reader said that his commitment to Hyper-V was for a single, simple reason: it was cheaper.
Curious to find out if this logic prevailed among other users, an informal poll of 22 Microsoft customers was conducted. The findings showed that while 17 percent were not sure and 16 percent would not choose lower cost over functionality, 43 percent would be willing to trade at least some functionality for a lower cost.
Currently, the Hyper-V product is maturing, and can often be found free – for example with Windows Server 2008 R2. Not only that, but it is fully compatible with System Center, and the newest iteration of System Center on the horizon – System Center 2012 – has garnered a number of favorable comments from previews that have been seen.
Microsoft is still positioned as a slightly lower-quality vendor in the cloud and virtualization marketspace, behind VMware and caught up with the other large competitor, Citrix. While the lower price of Hyper-V is currently enough to drive some businesses toward full adoption of a Microsoft solution, if the platform cannot deliver more in the coming years, even a lower cost will not be enough to justify its use by IT departments and companies worldwide.
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