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HP, Dell and others will effectively be bundling Hyper-V when they supply servers to their customers later this year. Some vendors, including Dell, HP and IBM are also offering the option of the embedded VMware bare-metal visualization product SEX Server 3i on their servers, via USB storage or a flash memory card that can be inserted to start the visualized environment.

"It will be interesting to see how OEMs handle this in the future," said Chris Single. "Will they offer embedded and bundled hyper visors, or will they offer alternative Skuas?" he asked.

Competition aside, the most important question is whether Hyper-V is any good. "What everyone will want to know is what the final performance of Hyper-V will be like?" said Ingle. "We haven't seen the numbers yet, and until we see some published performance figures, it is rather difficult to decide," he added.

Support for non-Microsoft guest operating systems may also be important to some companies, although Microsoft-only shops will not be too worried about the hyper visor's ability to support Linux. In fact, Microsoft has said Hyper-V will support 32- and 64-bit operating systems, including Server 2003 and 2008, and "Linux and other operating systems." Make of that what you will until further announcements clarify.

Of course, the supervisory itself is not really the whole story. To operate an effective virtual data center, various management tools are needed, and this is an area that VMware has been at pains to stress with its Virtual Infrastructure concept. VMware has leveraged its visualization technology to branch into other areas, including disaster recovery and business continuity.

It's certainly true that VMware's management tools are impressive, especially its much-touted V Motion product, which allows virtual machines (VMs) to be moved on the fly from one host server to another. The company also offers a companion Storage V Motion product, which can move disk storage associated with a particular VM from one storage medium to another without having to stop the VM.

At the moment, Microsoft doesn't have anything that can match the feature set of V Motion. For management software, Microsoft will hitch its wagon to the System Center family of products. Most significant will be the Virtual Machine Manger module. When integrated with the rest of System Center, it promises the ability to manage an entire Microsoft infrastructure regardless of whether individual machines are virtual. In a mixed physical and virtual server environment managed by System Center, Virtual Machine Manager provides features for provisioning and other VM-specific tasks. For example, Operations Manger provides the unified health monitoring, while Data Protection Manager provides the continuous data protection for all of the servers — both physical and virtual.

Of course, Hyper-V users will not be restricted to Microsoft-only management products, and it's likely the company will encourage plug-ins to System Center to enable specific vendors to work with it. Barb Gold worm said she believes things could go even further, "The Xen product has been architecture as a base hyper visor, then services are built on top of that, and then a management layer over that. So it may end up that people use Hyper-V, services from Citrix, and management from System Center."

Whatever emerges, it's likely that this will spur VMware to make even more advanced management products for its products, resulting in an increased sophistication and attraction of the whole actualization market.

The thing about Microsoft, however, is that it almost always gets what it wants. Come late 2008, Hyper-V is bound to be widely adopted by Microsoft shops that have yet to commit to virtualization. What will make the difference between a widely adopted product and one that can seriously challenge VMware in the long term are price, performance, and supporting tools and infrastructure.