I’m taking off my VMware goggles

In case you haven’t noticed, VMware is not the only game in town anymore in the hypervisor space. Take it from me, I was all VMware all the time, but I think it is time for me to take a step back and look at the competition. Microsoft and Hyper-V are making a push and it is now a viable solution with more enterprises running it in a production environment.  This led me to watch a Hyper-V course on TrainSignal and installing Hyper-V within VMware Fusion on my Mac Pro, kinda makes me feel a little dirty 🙂  It was very easy to get Hyper-V installed and running and the terms used between the 2 hypervisor companies is very similar and quick to pick up. I still have plenty to learn on Hyper-V and I’m not saying I am seriously considering moving from vSphere anytime soon but Hyper-V would probably do a fine job in my production environment. KVM is also on my radar.

As for the cloud offerings, VMware is quite behind AWS and Azure. Just look at the stock plummet last week after announcing a weak 4th quarter forecast and after EMC said it would reorganize the two companies cloud-computing offerings into a subsidiary named Virtustream. The article “Gartner shows two-horse rase in IaaS Cloud: AWS and Microsoft Azure” from NetworkWorld authored by Brandon Butler gives a good picture of who the leaders are (Gartner defined) and all of the others. It’s also time for me to take advantage of my vExpert status and start testing out Ravello Systems which leverages both AWS and Azure, but that will be another blog post.