Russ Fellows, a senior partner at the Evaluator Group analyst firm, said the Virsto acquisition suggests VMware is looking over its shoulder at Microsoft. By building its Hyper-V hypervisor into its operating system, Microsoft has the potential to undercut much of VMware’s value.
“Based on what I hear and who I talk to, VMware isn’t afraid of any company except Microsoft,” Fellows said. “Microsoft is the only company they really fear because of what Microsoft did to Netscape and other browsers. [Microsoft] took something that you could make money off [of], made it free and 99% as good; and all of a sudden, the market disappeared. [VMware is] worried about Microsoft doing the same thing to hypervisors.”
According to Fellows, VMware is fighting Microsoft for every inch of the hypervisor market, and the Virsto acquisition was a preventive strike to eliminate a potential Hyper-V advantage. “[VMware] knows they’ve stayed ahead of Microsoft in every regard, with the exception of Storage Spaces in [Windows] Server 2012,” he said. “I think they saw that as a potential advantage for Microsoft, and they didn’t want Microsoft to have an advantage anywhere.”
Storage Spaces is a new feature that enables thin provisioning of raw storage in the latest version of Hyper-V, allowing a virtual hard disk’s capacity to exceed the underlying physical disk capacity. Read the rest of the article
