Kurt Shintaku's Blog

[UPDATED 5/28/09 FOR “DAY 3" POST]

Wanna read some vendor-to-vendor drama? 

• Hyper-V Winning Daily; VMware FUD Reaching New Heights
  Out on the web, there’s an "anonymous" video purporting to show a Hyper-V crash. When I heard, I was surprised and immediately wanted to know more. I haven’t heard of any such incidents with Hyper-V and the Hyper-V R1 release has been incredibly stable and reliable. So, what did I find?

  Not much. Where are the details? There are no facts provided. What Hyper-V build was this? The beta? What was the configuration being tested? Who posted this? Why didn’t they contact Microsoft support? I mean there’s literally no data other than a defamatory statement at the beginning of the video implying that Hyper-V had something to do with some downtime at TechNet/MSDN. The SQL team and Operations responded to this days ago. In short, Hyper-V had nothing to do with the outage.
  So, why would someone create such a video? Let’s dig a little deeper. The poster, who doesn’t appear on the video, doesn’t state what company he works for or provide any context. Gee, I wonder where he works?
  …<drum roll please>…
  Introducing Scott Drummonds, VMware Product Marketing.
  http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/09/hyper-v-winning-daily-vmware-fud-reaching-new-heights.aspx

• Day Two of the Scot Drummond VMware FUD Fiasco
  Scott is still missing the most basic of information. What version of Hyper-V was this? Was this the version included with Windows Server 2008? If so, that’s the beta. Did you apply the RTM update? Did you use the final shipping Integration Components in the guests? Did you include the Linux Integration Components for the Linux guests?
  The way this information is dribbling out indicates a lack of methodology and systematic testing. Apparently, VMware has no problem ignoring these precepts when it suits them.
  http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/09/day-two-of-the-scott-drummond-vmware-fud-fiasco.aspx
  
• VMware FUD Fiasco Part 3…
  [VMWare Benchmarking guy Bruce Herndon claims the VMware’s YouTube was a mistake.]
  Why did TWO WEEKS PASS with next to no details about the video?
  Why, in the meantime, has VMware Sales Staff been contacting customers and would be customers telling them to "check out this video"?
  Why have your senior architects been Twittering to "check out this video on You Tube"?
  Why is this video still public?
  http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/17/vmware-fud-fiasco-part-3.aspx

For some secondary commentary on this back and forth between us and this VMware Product Manager:

• Slinging the Youtube Mud
  Hyper-V doesn’t just randomly crash on "consolidated workloads". Anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes with the product can tell you that. I can make VM’s crash left and right on ESX if I set it up the right (wrong) way as well. Does that mean I should post up a video proclaiming ESX is only fit for crashing VM’s on a consolidated workload?
  http://virtualizationreview.com/Blogs/Mental-Ward/2009/05/Slinging-the-YouTube-Mud.aspx
• Thoughts on Uses of Youtube and Virtualization
  Drummonds confesses he made the post and gives some blather about using two virtual disks (in VMware IDE performance isn’t much good, so they run the test from SCSI disks. In Hyper-V IDE performance matches SCSI yet they wanted to run the test from SCSI disks, which conveys a degree of ignorance of hyper-V and a lack of scientific method – what effect does doubling the number of disks  have on the validity of the tests ?).
  http://blogs.technet.com/jamesone/archive/2009/05/10/thoughts-on-uses-of-youtube-and-virtualization.aspx

One person posted the following comment on VMware’s video relative to some efforts we’ve made:

“While there was some attempts to blast the quality of the Microsoft "FUD’ video production…it was not factually incorrect from a marketing stand point. VMWare’s video on the other hand is a complete staged hoax. His blog entry response shows a complete lack of understanding of Hyper-V or creating any valid test criteria. With Hyper-V you can use multi proc with Hyper-V and SUSE distros (and Windows 2003+). This takes advantage of the non-emulated VMBus architecture of Hyper-V. Simply put, VMWare can never overcome the limitation of their design and now rely on the gospel of "memory over commit" as their key value to the primarily windows shops. Trust me, memory is cheap! As a Microsoft focused partner, I definitely have my bias. IMHO, customers who have mixed 50/50 Linux should use VMWare because Hyper-V’s support for Linux has been slow. Most of the companies who needed that feature set have probably already bought it already. However, for the 90% of customers who don’t need to spend 30k a year in VMware support contracts to run a 98% Windows infrastructure…Hyper-V will run it faster, cheaper, and better support from a single vendor.”