How Microsoft Cloud strategy is different than VMware

Yesterday Microsoft announced the community technology preview release of Server Application Virtualization. With Server App-V, you are capturing an image of the application with the Server Application Virtualization Sequencer, copying that image up to Windows Azure with the Server Application Virtualization Packaging Tool, and deploying it on a Windows Azure worker role.

No need to customize your apps now for MS Azure. so your applications can take benefit of microsoft Azure cloud hosting without any special coding considerations.

Other way facilitated by windows Azure VM role [yet in beta] is to take a full Hyper-V VHD file with the OS and Application installed on it, and copying that Virtual Machine as windows azure VM role. Now this is what Microsoft is doing different than VMware which does not let you host your apps/VM in their hosted environment. VMware  Vcloud software enables vendor to create an Infrastructure as a service model cloud and let different organizations to host their infrastructure in the cloud managed by vendor. The difference in Microsoft and VMware strategy is that while Microsoft is allowing hosting in their environment and in vendor, VMware is not hosting and managing your workloads but only vendors are. How many of us will be confident that all those vendors have good experience in managing such cloud environments [except a few big names like HP, IBM etc]. I have used Vcloud solution and i like it and it would be interesting to see how Microsoft next release of SCVMM  [very focused on cloud] and SCCM due next year compete with next version of Vcloud due next year.
 
GAURAV ANAND
 
Blog is based on my Personal understanding of the Technologies mentioned above and information provided is AS IS.