3 March 2008
by Simon Quicke
The trend to expand the virtualisation user base was given a shot in the arm after VMware unveiled OEM agreements with a number of server vendors.
The decision to bundle its Hypervisor software with Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, Sun and IBM servers will expand the market and was announced just weeks before Microsoft makes its virtualisation package a central part of the Server 2008 launch.
Matt Piercy, Northern European channel manager at VMware, said the move to bundle Hypervisor with major server vendors would benefit the channel rather than cannibalise existing sales.
"Our experience shows that customers who use this to make a single partition of a server will then want to do more and will go to the channel for that," he said.
He added that it was not aiming to rain on the Microsoft parade but it had been convenient to make the announcement at last week’s VMworld in Cannes.
Microsoft is putting its virtualisation software into Server 2008, which had its launch preview last week, and a spokesman for the company said it also had strong OEM relationships.
Late last year Neil Sanderson, product manager for management and virtualisation at Microsoft, told MicroScope that concerns about complexity and cost had put some customers off the idea of virtualisation but once they started using it they would be converted to the benefits of the software (MicroScope, 17 December 2007).
