Much as I have distain for Microsoft, in this market they are behind, BUT they can and do support and build an eco system of partners around their solutions, whereas VMware are trying to eat their eco system and do everything themselves. Unless VMware learn from MS in this case then they will suffer and ISVs will gravitate away from VMW and closer to Mr Softy!

Been using ESX 3.0.1 (and VI3) for our core infrastructure for about 3 years now, and I'm now in the process of deploying a new cluster based on 3.5.

Problem is whilst the hypervisor is cool, and technically it's the most advanced out there - ESX / VI still seems like a solid beta.

It just doesn't seem reliable enough. HA in particular is flakey at best. Sometimes the HA agent on the host simply decides it's had enough. There's bugs galore in each release that fixes a load of other bugs.

Microsoft and Citrix are nowhere near as advanced as VMWare, and if I have to virtualise the bulk of our boxes I'd only want to do it on ESX - however in another 5 years I'll be reviewing Microsoft's offer in a lot more detail.

Remember MS have only released 1.0 of Hyper-V. Give it version 3.0 and things could be interesting....!

Agree about Maritz. Seems to be a good fit for vmware and a better speaker than Greene.

Watching the keynotes this week was interesting. VMware stated subtly, but in no uncertain terms, that they want to own everything. And, much like the Oracle example in this article, VMware charges you through the nose and makes no bones about it. Yes, they provide value, but they still cost way too much.

Xen is giving away their hypervisor and live migration capabilities. Microsoft was showing off live migration and will also have load balancing and a whole bunch more in their R2 release. While all the cloud talk is interesting, it still seems like a vision that is many years away.

@Robert Amleth: Yes, I think so, too; VMWare DO "want to own everything." And so do Microsoft. And so do most of the "bigs"; they don't know how to grow in an open, openly-competitive market ecosystem. VMWare, at least, have told themselves that they do know - and that is the root cause of the "comeback".

Thinking about the "one-throat-to-choke" "nirvana"... experienced managers with an appreciation for history may recall that, in the times when Microsoft and, earlier, IBM big iron ruled their respective worlds, the throat that was most often and severely choked was the customer's. Do we as an industry really want to go down that road again? One definition of insanity, after all, is repeating the same actions over and over, in the firm expectation of differing results...

"They need to massively improve their Linux support, which they show signs of doing."

In what sense? They support MORE distros that anyone else!

Unless of course you are referring to the lack of a VC client for Linux in which case, just run Workstation with a Windows guest and run it in that. That's what I do (until a client for Linux is released).