of market lead and brand presence, HP has knocked the value proposition out of the park. Is Citrix with XenServer an independent viable competitor against VMware? Yes, but that’s a tough slog. Enabling companies to create alternative products such as Citrix XenServer, HP ProLiant Select Edition greatly expands customer choice for a wide range of market needs.

HERROD If you’re an SMB with 1,000 employees or less— and 70 percent of our customers are what we define to be SMBs—you don’t care if it’s Xen, VMware, or Microsoft. You want simplicity, availability, and security, and you want something that can be supported by your staff. STEWART If you’re an SMB and already running Windows Server 2008, you enable Hyper-V, use the same management tools that you have been using, and depend on the management construct to help you beyond the virtualization platform.

In the SMB market, Microsoft has pushed System Center outside of the enterprise to System Center Essentials. If you have a small number of servers, buy Essentials, and you can inexpensively manage the platform. BISHOP I think that’s right. Start with what you know, stick with the vendors you know and the technology you know, and it’s going to allow you to get the biggest bang for the least cost. CREEGER If you run lots of Oracle, then would you work backward from Oracle and ask what would work best? GUSTAV No, I’d work backward from the operating-system level because that’s really what you’re managing. Back to your point of “I’m not worried that there are three hypervisor vendors,” companies should worry less about that because hypervisors from all the vendors are slowly but surely providing the same functionality. CROSBY But then it’s about virtualization management. Because VMware is the market leader in a new category, everything that it does challenges an existing player. It challenges the operating-system guys because virtualization separates them from the hardware; the storage guys because storage management for virtualization is done on the host and that threatens the whole Symantec/Veritas model; and the management players, too.

VMware confronts a lot of entrenched interests and threatens them. So VMware could end up as a systems management play, a storage management play, or a big brain that manages the future data center—and that would threaten Cisco or its competitors. The interesting question for VMware is where does it go from here? Every step it takes threatens an established vendor in an existing market sector.

BISHOP SMB players that purchase management software will get it from the virtualization vendors, and the rest will do it by hand, which is what they’ve always done. I am not saying that their management functions aren’t important. It’s just that the problems to be solved for the SMB market are not big enough, hard enough, and expensive enough for management companies to address. CREEGER What happens to the management business when management companies cede it to virtualization companies on the SMB side and alternatively get squeezed by offerings from the cloud?

GUSTAV It’s a counter-trend. One of the things we do at our CTO event in California is to bring in early-stage companies that have little chance to sell to us or other large enterprises today, but may at some future date. These are the real bleeding-edge, radical-thinking folks. One of the things we saw was that people are putting management in the software deployment layer on top of EC2 (Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud; http://aws. amazon.com/ec2/).

My advice for SMBs able to tolerate off-site data processing is that management options, possibly from third parties, will be available in the not-too-distant future for EC2 and other cloud models and provide management flexibility similar to solutions from VMware, Veridian, and Xen. Even in the cloud, where you literally care about nothing, third-party vendors will come in to provide common abstractions.

As a classic example, one of the things that I’m most interested in virtualizing right now is the desktop. I might actually use Citrix on top of Xen or VMware, or CXD on top of VMware to do that particular function.

The Citrix technology is much better for the presentation layer of virtualization. At the present state of technology, I find VMware’s framework for doing physical-to-virtual migrations and similar functions to be better. In addition to that, I may do an application virtualization layer with a SoftGrid-like technology ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Application_ Virtualization/).

I might use all three major vendors, depending on their strengths, and match to our needs to create a single integrated desktop, or DaaS (Desktop as a Service): one vendor for the presentation layer, a different one for application virtualization, and a third one for the hypervisor.

The more interesting point is that from an IT management point of view, the hypervisor is getting less and less interesting. Worry less about where you get your hypervisor from and more about where you get your manage-