Storage Vendors Prepare For Hyper-V

Microsoft hopes to weaken VMware's dominance in virtualization by acquiring support from storage vendors.

Double-Take Software and NetApp announced last week that they will provide support for Microsoft's upcoming Hyper-V.

Last week at the Microsoft Tech-ED Pro conference in Florida, Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's server and tool business, explored Microsoft's virtualization goals.

According to Muglia, virtualization software vendors can now run their products on Windows Server 2008 and previous versions of the operating system.

After this autumn's release of Hyper-V, Windows Server 2008 will provide Hyper-V functionality.

Muglia said Microsoft will launch four new virtualization certifications.

Microsoft will also launch the Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 preview (RC1), and the Forefront security product line will provide support for virtualization technology.

Double-Take will release a copy and backup product for Windows Server 2008 Hyerp-V, enabling IT managers to achieve continuous replication and virtual machine backup between Hyper-V hosts for disaster recovery (known as V2V recovery).

Bob Roudebush, head of Microsoft solution design, said that Double-Take for Hyper-V is for users with no budget experience, so that they do not need to install Microsoft clusters and use embedded QuickMigration replication capabilities.

Most of the 12000 users of Double-Take are Windows products, because it is mainly focused on small and medium enterprise users, so Double-Take's products fill a market gap and open the door to VMware at the same time.

Double-Take for Hyper-V also allows system administrators to copy virtual machines between hosts, regardless of whether they are in the same physical site.

And this product can save a lot of cost, because it does not require shared storage between two nodes, such as SAN.

Instead, it effectively creates a virtual RAID disk by placing data in two nodes and duplicating between the two nodes.

Double-Take's products will be released before and after Microsoft's Hyper-V, from August to September.

Julie Geer, senior manager of PR relations at Citrix, said the company plans to increase support for Citrix XenServer hypervisor soon.

Last week, NetApp announced that SnapManager 5 for Exchange Server, Single Mailbox Recovery 5 and SnapManager 5 for SQL for are now available, and compatible with them.

Illuminata chief analyst Jonathan Eunice said: "there is no doubt that in the field of virtualization, VMware is like a 600 Pound Gorilla.

Storage management, high availability, software licensing, Q&A management and other manufacturers are trying to match VMware. "

But Microsoft is not just a gorilla, it is King Kong.

Moreover, Microsoft will provide users with a wide range of Hyper-V at almost free prices.

Many people predict that in the next five years, Hyerp-V, whether in the form of independent products or embedded in the form of Windows Server 2008, will be widely used by users and become one of the severe challenges faced by VMware.