VMware Shows Different Direction in Support for Microsoft Hyper-V

Colin Steele at IT Knowledge Exchange points out something very interesting about this week’s announement that VMware will support Hyper-V.

“This release contradicts everything VMware has said about multi-hypervisor infrastructures,” Steele writes. He cites Eric Siebert’s VMworld 2009 recap. VMware CEO Paul Maritz said that VMware would focus only on its own hypervisor product, because that’s what customers want.

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None the less, this week VMware released a vCenter plugin called XVP Manager. Using this tool, Hyper-v host IP addresses can be added to vCenter using the standard Add Host wizard. Alternately, users can import VMs directly from a Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Administrators will then be able to conduct basic tasks such as deleting VMs, powering them on and off or rebooting them.

So why the reversal?

Steele thinks it’s because the demand for Hyper-V among VMware customers has increased since Maritz said that. “If vCenter can’t manage Hyper-V, organizations that dabble in Microsoft’s hypervisor could move on to third-party tools, or worse, to Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager,” he writes.

Whatever the reason, cross-compatibility among virtualization tools is a good thing, and this is a modest first step in that direction.

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