Timely Microsoft News!?! Switch to Hyper-V Promotion & Hyper-V 2016 Scalability Numbers
The gloves are officially off as this week Microsoft released a very interesting promotion as well as some pretty impressive scalability numbers for Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V. These are very timely announcements coming just before VMware’s biggest show – VMworld 2016 which takes place in Vegas, USA starting on 8/28.
VMware to Hyper-V Migration Offer
It’s really no secret; Microsoft and VMware are the clear leaders in the x86 Virtualization space – with VMware holding the majority of the space (according to Gartner). This creates a huge opportunity for Microsoft to poach from the unhappy, frustrated or even cost conscious VMware customers base and with all the cool stuff in Windows Server and Hyper-V 2016 that trend should continue to increase.
So, what’s the deal? Well….From September 1, 2016 through June 30, 2017 customers that switch their workloads from Hyper-V to VMware can get FREE Windows Server Datacenter licenses whenever they buy Windows Server Datacenter + Software Assurance (SA). The net being you’re effectively just paying for SA.
The Datacenter license permits you to unlimited Operating System Environments (OSE) of Windows Server on the licensed host. The Standard license permits you to run 2 before you have to license individually. 99.9% of the environments use Datacenter if you’re using virtualization.
What’s Software Assurance and What’s it Get Me?
SA for short – gets you access to the newest software releases and upgrades. The ability to leverage (via credits) Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS), Training and the famous or infamous 🙂 Premier Support. Needless to say most enterprise customers are have Software Assurance, it does provide great value over the life of an Enterprise Agreement period.
So if this sounds even remotely interesting you should check out the new TCO Calculator and contact your Microsoft license reseller.
For YEARS now the VMware and Microsoft cult’s continue their banter back and forth on speeds and feeds – vCPU’s, vRAM, HotAdd? Virtual Hard Disk limitations? You call that management!??! Yes, this still happens. So – Microsoft has published their preliminary scalability numbers for Windows Server 2016.
The interesting piece of this is the massive numbers compared to Server 2012/2012R2…this should really open the door for the ability to really virtualize any application regardless if it’s data analytics, machine learning OR those previously unvirtualized massive databases.
Image courtesy of Windows Server Blog
With the increase in scalability on top of the awesomeness of the auto-disk tiering that Storage Spaces Direct and ReFS bring forth there’s no doubt in my mind that more folks will be looking at Hyper-V closer than ever before.
