A few weeks ago, I followed some back and forth commentaries comparing Microsoft’s Hyper-V to VMware’s vSphere. There was a lot of discussion on the features of Hyper-V and vSphere, which touched on the support of guest operating systems. It was in the discussion of guest OS support that I realized there was a conflict of interest, on the part of Microsoft, as both the creator of the Windows operating systems and the Hyper-V hypervisor.

You can read my article on this on TechTarget at http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/column/0,294698,sid94_gci1443339,00.html

Here is some background data that was not in the article. These are the “back and forth commentaries” that I mentioned:

This started with an InformationWeek article by Elias Khnaser, that inspired a response by Chris Steffen on the Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog. From there, Eric Gray added his thoughts and then Nicholas Weaver did a great write-up of his thoughts on the topic. At this point, Ben Armstrong (Virtualization Program Manager at Microsoft) added a comment to Nicholas’ blog and Nicholas followed that with a second post. Follow all of that? Now you see why it is not in the article.