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HUBER: If we look at the average cost per virtual machine, then the VMWare solution is actually more effective.

A further slant of Microsoft's marketing strategy is to go against the concept of virtualisation as a technological panacea.

"Not everything needs to be virtualised. So it's not like next year, we need to virtualise as an industry every server there is. The competition today talks about virtualisation as a solution for everything because all they sell is virtualisation - for any ill, issue or complexity, virtualisation is the answer, but actually that's not accurate," says Adam.

"If you're running a large database on a server and the server is highly-utilised, you don't need to run multiple virtual machines on it because it is highly-utilised and you're running a large database.

So all customers will need to figure out the environment and size of the workload, not their machines but the workload itself, and then make a determination," he explains.

VMWare's Huber disagrees with the concept of virtualisation as a technological panacea as well: "Virtualisation can help in a lot of areas, I wouldn't say that one size fits all. There are definitely some exceptions where virtualisation cannot help.

But he also says that: "At least 80%-90% out of x86-based applications that run in the datacentre are definitely good candidates for virtualisation and that can help a lot to solve the current situation.

Perhaps the most noticeable differential between Microsoft's approach in comparison to VMWare's past strategy is cost. Although Microsoft isn't making too big a deal out of it, Hyper-V's standalone cost is under US$30 and it is being shipped with Server 2008 for a similar add-on price, a fact that is causing some commentators to believe the company is attempting to undercut the competition.

"While Hyper-V is part of Windows Server 2008, the management suite is not, that's something you purchase. And even in that, the completeness of the solution and the cost is pretty much industry-leading for us. So I don't think cost by itself is how we look at it," Microsoft's Adam says.

VMWare's Huber, on the other hand, doesn't feel that the market price is a true reflection of the cost: "If we look at average cost per virtual machine, the VMWare solution is actually more effective.

Don't look at the cost of the software itself, there are a lot of hidden costs behind and what we see is actually when running VMWare virtualisation platform product, we can put a lot more virtual machines on the same hardware and therefore the actual cost of a virtual machine is lower than what Microsoft can offer.

It is by no means clear which technology offers more to enterprises that are considering virtualisation. What is clear is that the virtualisation buzz has built to a crescendo and the products that hope to back up the industry's hype are coming to market.

The one point on which Huber and Adam agree is that virtualisation is just a short time away from being a mainstream technology for enterprises, with Adam giving a specific timeframe of just a year or two.

"Every single thing I've heard so far from customers in the last year, year and a half tells me that with what we're bringing to market, virtualisation is going to start blooming like a thousand different flowers everywhere," Adam concludes.

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