On Monday I had the opportunity to participate in Microsoft’s Virtualization Launch, and introduced trends in virtual and physical infrastructure management before Microsoft’s Edwin Yuen took the stage to describe Microsoft’s take on data center management. While Edwin’s presentation focused primarily on the virtual infrastructure, his message of top-down management starting at the application, and automating management tasks in response to application state resonated well with the audience.

There was a large vendor presence at the event, and it was easy to see that Microsoft is quickly building a sizeable vendor ecosystem around its virtualization stack.

Much of the day’s top news came out of Bob Muglia’s keynote:

• Microsoft’s plans for cloud computing and data center automation
• Microsoft Hyper-V Server, the stand-alone Hyper-V product, will be available as a free product within 30 days
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 will also be available within 30 days
• Microsoft demonstrated Hyper-V’s live migration capabilities that will be available in Windows Server 2008 R2

In his keynote, Bob made repeated references to “User-centric Computing,” which “Provides users with a seamless experience as possible as they roam between devices.” Sure, Microsoft’s cloud vision sounds like what others are also working toward in the industry, but Microsoft has been doing something with regards to data center automation and cloud computing that I truly respect – showing automation with working products. I’ve made it no secret that I’m not interested in vendors showing me dynamic data center management using a PowerPoint slide with a bunch of boxes on it. Instead, show me what you got. That’s what Microsoft has been doing since April when they first publicly demonstrated Systems Center Operations Manger and Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager integration and orchestration at the Microsoft Management Summit. If you haven’t seen any of the demos and are interested in seeing more about Microsoft’s work integrating Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager, you should take a look at Rakesh Malhotra’s blog.

That’s not to say that VMware can’t do similar things with several of their management software partners – they can today. They just need to do a better job articulating those solutions, and I fully expect them to at VMworld next week.

The decision to offer Hyper-V Server, Microsoft’s planned stand-alone hypervisor, as a free product within 30 days didn’t come as a surprise. I had expected such a move in response to VMware offering their ESXi hypervisor as a free download. Being a big proponent of high availability for virtualized production environments, I wouldn’t use either free product in production. Neither free product includes high availability, so you would need to purchase Windows Server 2008 Datacenter or Enterprise Edition (Hyper-V), or VI3 Standard Edition (ESXi) to get those features.

It also wasn’t much of a surprise that System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008’s release was imminent. Microsoft is hoping that Virtual Machine Manager 2008’s support for managing VMware environments (code named “Gateway Services for NetWare“) will encourage shops to leverage VMM to manage both ESX and Hyper-V environments. Performance Resource Optimization (PRO) is one of VMM’s top features, as it allows administrators to automate practically any type of response to a given condition within the application stack, including responding to application, virtualization, system, storage, or network events. VMM PRO tips are fully extensible, allowing any third party hardware or software vendor to integrate their solution with VMM.

Microsoft also demonstrated live migration support for Hyper-V virtual machines, a feature planned for the Windows Server 2008 R2 release. Microsoft demonstrated live migration by showing a streaming video playing without disruption as a media server VM is moved from one physical host to another. You may hear a couple of vendors challenge the use of streaming media to demonstrate live migration, since a media player’s receive buffer can mask a network delay as a VM moves from one physical host to another. I wasn’t that worried about this, since most virtualization vendors use streaming media to show their own live migration capabilities too. Of course, the proof will come soon enough, once we have a Windows Server 2008 R2 beta to work with.

A few folks asked me what I thought was the point of demonstrating a technology that was at least several months away from shipping. To me, the answer is simple. Virtualization is an infrastructure technology, and organizations are not going to rip and replace it on a whim. By offering a glimpse of its near-term features, Microsoft is making it’s case for organizations to think about Hyper-V today, knowing that features such as live migration will be in the product very soon. I think Microsoft should  be even more forthright with other Hyper-V feature enhancements that will be in the R2 release in order to build further interest in its virtualization solution.

At the event, I had the opportunity to talk to several organizations that had deployed Hyper-V. In each case, the IT staff present at the Microsoft Virtualization Launch uttered a similar phrase – “good enough.” We’ve been talking about the “good enough factor” within Burton Group for several months now, and VMware is keenly aware of this too. Next Tuesday at VMworld, it will be VMware’s chance to respond. Building a better hypervisor doesn’t beat “good enough.” The answer to “good enough” isn’t in a product, but it is in an integrated solution. Next week, VMware needs to show the world their answer to “good enough.” The answer doesn’t come in a few key phrases or with marketing spin. It has to come with game changing solutions that redefine how we manage IT, from the user to the application and into the infrastructure. No one (with the exception of some vendor marketing folks) will argue against the technical superiority of VMware’s ESX hypervisor and virtual infrastructure solution. Microsoft’s virtualization story starts at the user and the application and ends at the virtual and physical infrastructures, while VMware’s story usually starts at the virtual infrastructure and moves up the stack. These are two uniquely different approaches to what both vendors would argue is the future of IT. There will be a lot of talk about infrastructure at VMworld next week, and I’ll be listening closely to hear a story that starts at the user and application. To me, that’s the story VMware has to tell.

Note: Originally posted to Burton Group’s Data Center Strategies blog.