Microsoft Issues Hyper-V Release Candidate - VMware is dismissive (
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Market leader VMware has also been dismissive of Microsoft's upcoming product, with Bogomil Balkansky, VMware's senior director of product marketing, telling eWEEK in December 2007 that its ESX Server is a comparable, but better, product.
"Hyper-V is Microsoft's hypervisor, while ESX Server is ours. But I don't think you can really compare Microsoft's new offering and our product, which has been available for seven years," Balkansky said.
"Customers want stability, maturity, robustness and resilience from their virtualization products, and we have the benefit of having it proven in production all around the world, with customers running mission-critical applications on ESX Server," he said.
Microsoft has also released a Knowledge Base article about the Hyper-V release candidate, which says this provides improvements in security, stability, performance, user experience, forward compatibility of virtual machine configurations, and in the programming model.
It also recommends that "all users of the Hyper-V role are encouraged to apply this update," but points out that if those virtual machines created on the Hyper-V beta build do not start after the Hyper-V role is updated to a later version, they can use the existing virtual hard disk file.
"However, the virtual machine configuration settings must be re-created. If the virtual machine is running a prerelease version of Windows Server 2008, the virtual machine configuration settings and the operating system .vhd file must be re-created."
Microsoft executives are also trying hard to position the company's virtualization offerings as cost-effective, reducing complexity, and covering all the ground from the desktop to the data center.
"This positions us to take advantage of significant growth opportunities in the virtualization space … the availability of the near-final code and the seamless migration path to the final code for Hyper-V brings Microsoft one step closer to making virtualization a reality for customers," Hilf said.
Virtualization 
