Microsoft and the Virtualization delays debate

http://blogs.technet.com/davidzi/archive/2007/05/13/thoughts-on-the-windows-server-virtualization-announcement.aspx

By now most readers of this blog will have heard that some of the planned Windows Server Virtualization (Viridian) features have been deferred. The details were posted here. Dan Kusnetzky over on ZDnet has a blog post with good analysis of the options. This was certainly a disappointment for those of us who are excited about the technology.Clearly some work needs to be done on the planning and expectation setting process. The bottom line in a situation like this is that this technology is complicated and sometimes issues crop up that are not possible to anticipate and sometimes take longer than expected to solve. This leads to the situation where you are behind schedule. At this point, as both the orginal post and Kusnetzky’s post point out, in software dev you have three choices: Reduce quality and testing to ship on time; Push out the release date for the full product; Cut features and ship on schedule. You then need to make the decision as to which course to take and let your customers know as soon as possible. Given the state of the market, my view is that the team made the right decision.

A great post by one of the guys from Microsoft. I agree, look regardless of how you feel about Microsoft’s Virtualization platform, the sooner they get it on the market, the sooner I can evaluate it against VMWare, VirtualIron, Xen, see what’s right for me or my business, crucially, once it’s out its then that I can provide feedback, and evolve the product from there, it brings new opportunities to the market, which has to be a good thing.

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