With all of the debate going on with Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, it seems that some companies in the SMB market are starting to take on Hyper-V. CIO Magazine posted an article regarding the SMB market and Hyper-V slithering its way into some VMware shops.
Even within enterprise data centers, where automation, high-level management and high availability often trump cost as buying criteria, free is a hard price to refuse, even for technology as complex and interconnected as virtual servers.
One of the common misconceptions regarding the cost of Hyper-V is the fact that you basically have no management tools. Yes, Hyper-V is included with Windows Server 2008 and above, but, the management consoles, OS licenses and other things required to manage the virtual infrastructure are not free. Once you add in the costs of the management tools then you see that the costs are up there with VMware’s.
This is a key time for 3rd Party vendors to take a dive into building management suites targeted towards the SMB market that wants to attempt taking advantage of Microsoft Hyper-V. I would imagine that if this trend continues we would see a boom of 3rd party management suites for Hyper-V. Now I am not trying to turn this into a debate but I personally think that people could turn to running, dependent on the need, VMware Hypervisor. That might just make for a good follow-up article, a “free” hypervisor comparison. Sound off in the comments section your thoughts!
