During this interview at the Microsoft booth at VMworld2008 in Las Vegas, Virtualization veteran Mike Neil recalls his past at Connectix, and his involvement with Virtual PC & Virtual Server and more recently his role in the Hyper-V launch. He discussed planned features such as Hyper-V live migration, VM standards and their planned support of the OVF-format.
Mike also explains why the VM formats are so similar between the Xen & Hyper-V-environment. These architectures were both designed with a thin hypervisor in mind, while using the drivers of the parent partition ecosystem (resp. Xen/Linux; HyperV/Windows). A similar hypervisor architecture is used by Sun with Solaris now. VMware on the contrary has always chosen to build the drivers into the larger ESX hypervisor.
Mike looks forward to VDI through RDP & the Microsoft partnership with Citrix, but also mentions the Calista acquisition and the new protocols this add to their VDI stack.
He firmly declines the rumors on an intensified Citrix – Microsoft relationship and gives his point of view on the industry challenge for virtualization licensing metrics (usage based, physical server based).
He also comments on the Vworld keynotes by VMware executives.
If you are in for a little fun, you might want to watch this video to the very end to meet Virtual Mike after the credits.
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