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VMware Claims Microsoft Is ‘Rigging’ Virtualization Market

By David Worthington

March 15, 2007 — (Page 1 of 2)
EMC subsidiary VMware nailed its proverbial theses to the door at the end of February, when it published a white paper accusing Microsoft of underhanded tactics and conspiring to freeze competitors out of the virtualization software market. Microsoft denies the accusations and vows that it will keep its software interoperable.

The white paper, released Feb. 27, alleges that Microsoft is restricting customers’ flexibility to run the virtualization software of their choice by “limiting who can run their software and how they can run it.”

The message: Microsoft is generating dependency on its products.

VMware’s accusations are premised on Microsoft’s decision to restrict access to proprietary virtualization APIs to certain partners—in particular, Novell—and adoption of licensing conditions that limit virtual machine portability, especially in the use of Microsoft’s VHD virtual hard disk format. The APIs orchestrate communication between Windows itself and what will eventually become Longhorn’s hypervisor, which manages resources for multiple virtual machines. VMware claims that Microsoft is not permitting the APIs to be used by other virtualization software vendors and open source projects.

API SHARING
Mike Neil, general manager for virtualization at Microsoft, countered the accusation in his blog, writing: “To encourage interoperability, we openly share technology and have published a set of APIs [announced at the June 2006 WinHEC conference] for all our commercially available virtualization products today and provided documentation on APIs for the hypervisor that will be part of the next version of Windows Server, code-named Longhorn.”

Neil claimed that Microsoft will publish the APIs publicly, in beta form.

The white paper claims that restrictions placed on the VHD format prevent system images from being run outside of Microsoft’s Virtual Server environment. Language in Microsoft’s licensing backs up the assertion that customers are barred from using its VHDs under anything other than Virtual Server and Virtual PC.

Beyond the shrinkwrap license, screenshot evidence presented in the white paper reveals that VHDs are configured to deactivate if they are run under other virtualization products. The white paper portrays it as an “aggressive mechanism” that will “force users to run virtual machines on Microsoft products, essentially undermining customers’ choice.”

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VMware faces threats from economy, Microsoft
CEO Paul Maritz is confident in VMware's long-term growth through the global economic downturn, and so far the company has seen increased revenue despite its management shakeup. Theresa Lanowitz says that competitors, particularly Microsoft, are still poised to decrease VMware's market share Read More...

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