techpulse360.com For Ballmer, server virtualization is still at a very early stage: less than 5% of servers are virtualized. vmware and other industry observers are talking more of 10% but maybe Ballmer is thinking of only Windows servers! Microsofts CEO sees the added management layer complexity and the high cost of virtualization software being the main culprits. The virtualization software on the market has been extremely expensive. My opinion. The way you manage virtualization is deviated from the way you manage everything else from the datacenter. And so, we see a real opportunity to commoditize virtualization: more integrated management, lower price, high quality (sic!) We had a tremendous reception to the work were doing with Hyper-V and our systems management software around it If you want virtualization on 80% of servers instead of 5% of servers, you better not charge 3 times as much the price as the server for the virtualization. Im not trying to be rude about it but for certain kind of applications the approach that vmware took is a perfectly good approach. But its not an approach that is going to lead to virtualization on a high percentage of servers, said Ballmer. Regarding desktop virtualization, Microsofts chief doesnt think most of the computation done at the client level will ever be recentralized back to a mainframe type of servers especially in a world where people fall in love with their phones, pcs, laptops! Instead, he sees desktop virtualization to be used to improve the experience of the client.
