Kevin you are the only one blowing smoke here.

This isn't all about partisanship; it's about you eating up MSFT marketing hype like a big tuna sandwich with a martini olive on top. It would be silly to accuse you of "supporting" Microsoft but it's obvious you've failed to sort out talking points from facts. A year ago, MSFT was talking about how virtualization might not be such a good idea, how it was a potential security risk, blah blah blah. They're using the same tactic to delay purchasing decisions until they can come out with a product that competes. It's a time-tested tactic and you totally fell for it.

You would have been totally justified to point out that VMotion requires a lot of infrastructure that most SMEs don't have, don't need and can't afford. Instead, you chose to parrot MSFT's FUD of the week. But hey if it means your blog gets more hits and CIO can charge more for ads on your pages, it must be good journalism right?

Kevin,

If the whole argument is that migrating a live VM is "too risky", then I have to beg to differ. I assume you've been around long enough to remember with clarity the argument that "mission critical applications should not be hosted on Microsoft Windows" -- since many people still argue this point, I feel pretty confident in my assumption.

What has lead many people - apparently including Krull - to feel otherwise? Simple, a proven track record. Microsoft has shown through years of successful implementations that, with proper administration and support, Windows is a viable platform to host just about any workload, mission critical or not. Personally, I feel that if something is truly mission critical, it should be running on a mission critical platform. There are only a couple of those around...HP's Non-Stop systems and IBM mainframes. Those systems were built to run for years with no downtime, something Windows and Linux aren't really that good at. I digress...

My point is that Chris Steffen is obviously not risk-averse. If he were, he would not have entrusted his "mission critical" systems to an unproven platform like Veridian (or whatever Hyper-V was called all those years ago!). If he were risk-averse and wanted to derive the benefit of virtualization, he would have had no choice other than to go with a VMware solution. At that point in time, it was clearly the least risky option.

So...playing the "risk" card with respect to a proven technology (VMotion has been around for years and there have been millions of successful migrations) is a little hypocritical, don't you think?

Oh, in the interest of full disclosure, I want to let you know that I am a community moderator on VMware's VMTN community forums (http://communities.vmware.com), and I have been providing consulting services around VMware technologies to Fortune 100 customers for the last four years. As a result, I get a little touchy when I see unsubstantiated claims like "The justification for the inherent risk just isn't there.".

I am actually very glad to see Microsoft release a viable hypervisor. It lends credibility to the segment and will only serve to expand the options available to the end user. As it stands today, Hyper-V is a great option for the SMB space, along with VMware Server. With ESXi now available for free, there is another, in many respects, better, option for the small shop.

Until MS releases a complete multi-host management solution, I honestly don't see Hyper-V being a viable "enterprise" solution. I look forward to the day when there can be an apples-to-apples comparison with VMware Infrastructure 3 (or 4...depending on the timeframe)!

> His point had nothing to do with the quality of the migration tools (or their existence, which seems to be a point of debate among VMware partisans). It had to do with the advisability of moving hot servers in the first place.

I would disagree to the point as for majority of my customers that ability is a business critical feature used in PRODUCTION to balance app workloads e.g. for banking and insurance front-ends, retail branches and others who are very sencitive to all kind of risks