Competition accelerates innovation, and the there is no doubt this has had an affect on VMware, initially with the release of $0 VMware Server, Player and now ESXi. However, one unstoppable force in the market is an ISV's paranoia and the need to control the hypervisor.

Although its inevitable that the hypervisor will be commoditized, we may see a shift in customer adoption if supportability of their software is threatened by the hypervisor it is run on.

Take for example, Microsoft. Today, Hyper-V is available, and if this is your platform of choice, the majority of Microsoft applications are automatically supported by Microsoft. Sure there are third-party support offerings that will give you Microsoft Support while running in a non-Microsoft VM, but that comes with an additional cost, and ultimately may still require that you convert your server back to a physical state or reinstall completely.

Ok, so that may have been old news. However, what if ISVs start picking sides or creating their own hypervisor? Here is where I am being more speculative based on what I think may happen. Let's take Oracle VM for example. Most of us haven't looked or used this technology, and its only a few months old. However, Oracle is claiming better application & database performance with Oracle , and they are providing the hypervisor and operating system (Oracle Unbreakable Linux) at no additional cost, which means the customer only pays for Oracle Applications, Middleware, Databases etc.

So what if all the ISVs follow the Microsoft path, and support their products on their own hypervisor, or they pick sides? Here is where the problem sets in for network admins in the data center of tomorrow:

1 - Applications will be grouped into silos of VM technology
2 - Customers that have ERP or middleware may be managed by a separate hypervisor. For example, a customer that relies on Oracle will use Oracle VM technology because of price, performance and supportability.
3 - Following on the footsteps of Oracle and Microsoft, other ISVs like Citrix, Baan, PeopleSoft, SAP etc. will either develop their own hypervisor or exclusively adopt an existing platform
4 - If a customer doesn't use the ISV's platform, they forgo supportability.
5 - Most hypervisors, if not all, will be provided for free.
6 - Management & automation tools will be able to control multiple hypervisors, thereby allowing customers to use a single interface to manage their VM environments.

The heterogeneous VM Manager race has already begun, with Microsoft at the lead with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. At launch, this management product will able to integrate with VMware VirtualCenter and ESX, Hyper-V, Virtual Server, and Citrix XenServer. Basic functions like initiating 'vMotions' between ESX hosts will also be provided given that VirtualCenter is based on Microsoft .Net technologies and Web Services.

So are we going down the right path?

The simple answer is yes. No matter how complicated the road ahead is, at the end of the day, we're still reducing our carbon footprint, reducing our time-to-market for new applications, reducing migration time and increasing disaster recovery predictability.

Virtualization is the future, perhaps that is an understatement today, but with VMware keeping everyone else on their toe's by constantly being ahead of the game, we're going to see some great innovation from all the leading software firms; we're barely scratching the surface. Stay tuned for more industry insight.

Nathan