Microsoft targets VMware with new deals

Mon Jan 21
By Daisuke Wakabayashi and Jim Finkle


SEATTLE/BOSTON (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp (MSFT.) said on Monday it bought a start-up company called Calista Technologies and expanded its alliance with Citrix Systems (CTXS.), targeting the fast growing virtualization market.

Microsoft's moves are part of a broader call to arms against the early leader VMware Inc (VMW.) in the market for technology that allows a single computer to act like many "virtual" machines, thus expanding its capacity to run various types of software and multiple operating systems.

"This is Microsoft coming out and staking the claim that they are serious about virtualization," said Forrester Research analyst Natalie Lambert. "When you think of VMware, you think virtualization. That is going to be a hurdle for Microsoft."

Virtualization is one of the most important developments in the software industry, because it disrupts the traditional business model, which marries one machine to one piece of software, such as an operating system.

The technology allows companies to save on hardware costs by running existing equipment more efficiently, while allowing companies to deploy applications faster without worrying that certain pieces of software will clash with one another.


More at: Reuters.com

Virtual PC 2007 is free from Microsoft. However, I do believe that VMWare is a better technology in that the virtual hardware options it makes available are more advanced than those of Virtual PC. Kinda sucky running Vista on an ancient S3 Trio graphics card, which is the default GPU option the last time I ran Virtual PC.

I don't think VMWare makes available a free version do they?

VMWare Server is free, Graham. There was discussions, a while ago, at the company I work for to use it for disaster recovery and patch testing purposes.

In features alone, VMWare beats Microsoft hands-down. I particularly like the VMWare converter, which you can run over a physical machine and create a virtual version of it!

Microsoft has a lot of work to do to catch up. I know that I tried VirtualPC one time and couldn't figure it out, where VMWare was fairly simple to use for me. It also is a lot more powerful as you said about the devices configuration.