Signs of an immature market
But is it really necessary for hypervisors to be a proprietary technology? Efforts by Microsoft and VMware to differentiate their hypervisors remind us of the networking situation thirty years ago, when all power suppliers believed in different technologies (Token Ring, Ethernet, ARCNET, etc.). Gradually, however, manufacturers have accepted the idea that taking a common standard (TCP/IP over Ethernet) and concentrating their efforts on innovation in the upper levels of the software stack, stimulates the growth of the market as a whole and, consequently, the value of the manufacturer’s own share of the pie. It seems that in the case of virtualization, suppliers are not yet ready to see the situation from this perspective. Today, speeches still revolve around concepts such as speed and feeds, but probably the market itself will finish by imposing its own rules.
If all server-based computers are in the early stages of a massive migration towards virtual machines, as many analysts argue, the lack of a standard hypervisor for Windows will only delay this transition. The fact that manufacturers focus on being different and unique shows that virtualization is still an immature business. The problem is that, despite this immaturity, many companies are already dependent on virtualization.… Read More
