VMware is going on the attack yet again, slamming Microsoft in a 2,000-word missive on its Virtual Reality blog.

In case you forgot, Virtual Reality is the blog VMware set up specifically to defend itself from criticism by the media, analysts and competitors. The most recent post targets the Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI Tool, an online calculator that partners can use to make the business case for Microsoft virtualization.

“Unfortunately we had to give it a failing grade,” writes VMware blogger Tim Stephan.

The post features a pretty in-depth analysis of the assumptions and calculations that Microsoft’s tool makes in “proving” that the upcoming Hyper-V hypervisor is a better value than VMware’s products. (Microsoft’s site doesn’t mention VMware, only a “competitive server virtualization solution.” As Stephan writes, “Gee, I wonder who the competitive solution is?”)

But the best part of the blog are the no-holds-barred shots that Stephan takes at Microsoft throughout. They include:

• “Of course the results were all hypothetical, because Hyper-V is not yet available.”
• “Like most Microsoft version 1.0 products, the initial release of this calculator has numerous errors, contains critical design mistakes, and completely misses its mark. … Maybe we all need to wait for the SP1?”
• “Microsoft’s tool assumes that Hyper-V will run as many VMs as VMware VI3 and deliver the same performance - we can’t wait until Hyper-V ships and prove (sic) this wrong.”

The blog also features this quiz:

Why did MSFT release such a misleading ROI/TCO model?
A) Microsoft did a sloppy and hasty job with the calculator
B) Microsoft is deliberately fudging the facts
C) Both A and B

Microsoft has been promoting its calculator to partners as they prepare to sell Hyper-V and try to chip away at VMware’s server virtualization market lead. I’m in no position to say who’s right and who’s wrong about the tool and its assumptions, but Microsoft partners might want to check out VMware’s stance before they start relying on the calculator too heavily. 

VMware has previously used Virtual Reality to accuse Microsoft of spreading lies, discredit a Yankee Group report and post “corrections” to a blog comparing VMware and Microsoft.

Slowly but surely, some of the big high-tech vendors have started pulling their channel partners into their “green technology” efforts. As Barbara Darrow blogged earlier this week, Sun is the latest to put a formal stake in the ground. Actually, honestly, they’re the first high-tech vendor that I can think of that really has made a public effort to include its VARs in this green thing.

So, in case you’re wondering just how much opportunity exists for services related to green technology rationalization, I wanted to share some statistics that were recently released by Forrester Research as part of a report called “The Dawn of Green IT Services.”

First, the bottom line: Forrester believes that overall services related to helping companies rationalize the energy efficiency and sustainability profile of their technology will peak at $4.8 billion in 2013, with roughly half of that spending coming from European businesses. (The services revenue for this year is expected to be around $500 million.) Much like the Y2K wave, green tech services will begin to taper off after this point as the practices become more a standard part of running an IT infrastructure, Forrester concludes. Another note: North America companies will be slower on the uptake than those in Europe, with spending peaking around $2.1 billion in 2013, the firm reports.

You can compartmentalize the opportunity for green tech services into three different buckets: the assessment phase, the planning and development phase, and the implementation phase.

As you might expect, assessments present the shortest-term opportunity, running between two and 10 weeks and costing $30,000 to $100,000. Only about 50 percent of companies will proceed to the next phase: detailed planning. But, Forrester figures that those that do should be willing to spend between $50,000 and $400,000 on roadmaps for any number of initiatives such as server virtualization and consolidation, an enhanced power infrastructure, and more energy-efficient servers and other gear.

Need more convincing that green tech isn’t just a boondoogle?

The big jackpot will go to those VARs and integrators that become involved in making green tech plans become reality. The implementation phases of these projects will take from 30 weeks to more than 100 weeks, according to Forrester. They can cost from $300,000 to $2 million — for the services alone.

By the way, here are some efforts that Forrester considers to crowd under the green IT umbrella:

• Green procurement policies
• E-waste recycling
• Data center optimization
• Supply chain optimization
• Building automation projects
• Collaboration and conferencing initiatives
• Managed print services

Heather Clancy is a high-tech journalists and strategic communications consultant with SWOT Management Group. She can be reached at hclancy@swotmg.com.

Sun Microsystems says it will help partners build eco-friendly IT solutions.

The company’s Eco Advantage Program offers partners tools to calculate for themselves or for their customers how to deploy the best, most energy efficient information technology.

“Partners can take customer data at the server and app level, profile [that] and develop the best case analysis/scenario. They can provide the carbon emission savings, space savings, cooling savings, ” said Bill Cate, senior director of global channel planning and programs for Palo Alto-based Sun.

The program includes the afore mentioned Eco Assessment Service, which evaluates actual data center energy use, cooling, air flow etc.; training on data center power and cooling needs; and modeling tools to help simulate energy requirements of alternative datacenter setups.

Helping customers save money is one way to go into accounts in a collaborative way, said Dermot Duggan, senior director for Sun’s eco drive.

“You can go into your installed base or new accounts and have a rare opportunity where you will get no pushback. You can say, ‘I can save you this much money’ and back that up with real data tied to the customer’s actual servers and storage.”

Hardly any customer will say no to paying less, right?

Vince Conroy, CTO of FusionStorm, San Francisco-based Sun partner said the program aligns with what his company is doing.

“We’ve developed a data center practice and energy conservation is an important component of that,” Conroy said.

Technologies like server virtualization, thin clients, virtual desktop computing, all play into that message.

And, since FusionStorm does some of its own hosting as well as managed services, cost savings are important to its bottom line as well.

Customers are starting to ask about energy efficient computing, although it’s not yet a groundswell, he said. ” It starts with some of the more forward thinking customers and they may be forward thinking because it makes business sense and they’re business savvy or this is a cause for them. In either case we’re seeing more activity [in energy efficient computing.”

Server virtualization, as has been reported endlessly, is one way to get bigger workloads out of fewer boxes and that will be key here. Asked whether it’s really in Sun’s best interests to sell fewer rather than more boxes and CPUs

As to whether it’s really in Sun’s best interests to sell fewer servers, Cates and Duggan said the trend is clear. Either Sun will sell more efficient technology or someone else will.
For hosting partners, the attraction of saving on cooling and electricity is obvious, but it’s also away for partners to help customers save money and perhaps divert some of those savings to additional services.

And the company’s quick to say it’s taking its own medicine, that its latest servers, built on the UltraSPARC T2 chips use multithreading technology and cram 5X the compute power into half the space and get 2.5 times better performance per megawatt.
The Sun execs said the company, through its own eco efforts, received $1 million in rebates onfrom PG&E over the last 12 months.

The company is hardly alone many hardware vendors have jumped on the green bandwagon: Hewlett Packard and IBM also have eco initiatives going.

 Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

Say what you will about VMware, but they sure aren’t shy when it comes to publicly taking on the competition. Whether it’s an employee attacking Citrix on his personal blog or sales memos that try to drive a wedge between Microsoft and Citrix, the server virtualization market share leader doesn’t pull too many punches.

The latest example comes from Virtual Reality, the corporate blog VMware set up just to defend itself from bad publicity — or, as they call it, “set the record straight.” Its new post comes from VMware’s Mark Chuang, who criticizes Microsoft for distributing a Yankee Group report that doesn’t exactly paint VMware in the best light.

The reason the report is unflattering to VMware? Because much of it was innacurate, according to Chuang — so much so, he says, that Yankee Group agreed to publish a revision and removed the original from its website.

That hasn’t stopped the ever opportunistic Microsoft from spreading the report around, most recently in a virtualization newsletter this week, Chuang says. He also accuses Microsoft of continuing to distribute the report despite a request from Yankee Group to stop.

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft keeps drawing attention to the report and, if so, what action VMware takes to stop them.

Hewlett-Packard yesterday began shipping VMware’s ESX 3i hypervisor embedded in its ProLiant servers.

After news broke last month that Dell may give away the ESX 3i for free with its servers, VMware resellers began to fear that other VMware OEM partners would follow suit — essentially killing their business in ESX 3i sales. But that isn’t happening in HP’s case, as virtualization.info reports that the company will charge $495 extra for servers with the ESX 3i.

All of VMware’s OEM partners should begin shipping servers with the ESX 3i sometime this month, and it will be interesting to see if the others follow Dell’s strategy or HP’s. Microsoft’s Hyper-V also hits the market later this year, and that release should have a major effect on VMware’s ESX 3i pricing as well. Microsoft plans to charge just $28 extra for Windows Server 2008 editions that feature Hyper-V.

This morning I spoke with David Lynch, vice president of marketing for Embotics, a VMware partner in Ottawa. I’d been trying to interview him for two recent stories on VMware channel conflict, and although we didn’t connect until now, what he had to say would have fit right into those articles.

Lynch said it’s “challenging” to work with VMware because the company keeps its partners in the dark about its product strategies. Partners don’t know if any of their upcoming releases will conflict with VMware’s, or if VMware’s coming out with something that will impede on their businesses.

“It’s extraordinarily difficult to get any form of access to their long-range plans,” he said. “We want to build products that are complementary, not products that go head-to-head.”

Embotics makes virtualization lifecycle management software that currently runs on the VMware platform. Version 2, due in June, will also work with Citrix and Microsoft virtualized environments.

Lynch doesn’t believe VMware purposely makes things tough for its partners — just that the company’s so focused on the ever-evolving server virtualization market that it can’t always keep partners in the loop.

“The market has changed so dramatically for them,” he said. “They know the value of the hypervisor itself over time is going to move practically to zero, which means that their revenue has to come from their management product.”

Embotics also partners with Citrix and has been invited to join up with Microsoft, too. Microsoft’s upcoming entry into the server virtualization market, Hyper-V, is drawing a lot of interest from customers, Lynch said.

“We haven’t seen anyone who’s said they’re not going to try the Hyper-V,” he said. “Everybody’s trying it.”

VMware channel conflict is also the topic of the inaugural Partner News Podcast, a new feature here at SearchITChannel.com.

Here’s an interesting juxtaposition. On Tuesday, Microsoft’s  Sam Ramji talked up the company’s progress wooing open-source ISVs to Windows Server 2008.

 Zend Technologies, the self-proclaimed “PHP company,” is the first ISV  to qualify  for Windows 2008 certification  (for its Zend Core.) Certification is a step up from the “works with”  Windows 2008 label.

Also SpikeSource, which tests various  software stack components together, is now testing with Windows Server 2008 and its virtualization components. JasperSoft’s business intelligence offering will also work with Windows Server 2008, And Spikesource will test its stack against Windows Server 2008, much as it did with Windows Server 2003 but will now incorporate the new server’s virtualization capabilities  into its test suite

While coming from the LAMP-y open source world, all of those vendors had previously talked up the need for fruitful coexistence with Microsoft, so none of this was particularly surprising.

 But, minutes after talking with Ramji (who was in San Francisco at the Open Source Business Conference), a Microsoft partner called to complain that the bulk of his other software vendors (his anti-virus/anti-spam provider, his data back up vendor etc.) are dragging their feet in fully supporting Windows Server 2008. These are allegedly the good citizens of the Microsoft stack world and yet …

Why would these Microsofty ISVs be so slow on the draw?

Simple, he said: They got caught up in Microsoft’s Vista push-and were then burned by  slow adoption. These ISVs are not feeling particularly disposed to go to the same level of effort on Windows Server 2008. They will support it but they’re in no hurry to do so.

One of these vendors, when he pressed, said not to expect native Windows Server 2008 support until at least April of 2009.

These “ISVs have a bad taste in their mouths because of Vista and I think they’re punishing me and my clients,” said this VAR.  Microsoft pressured these vendors in getting their wares ready for the big Vista wave which turned into a ripple.  Also, even Microsoft insiders blame the company for breaking app compability in Vista while still pressuring partners to get their apps ready for what became a moving target release.

Anyone can understand their concerns.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if Microsoft has a better stable of open source players suited up for Windows Server 2008 than traditional Microsoft allies?

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

Microsoft says it delivered a “feature complete” release candidate of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V today.

The RC has been qualified for guest OSes including Windows Server 2003 SP2, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10 SP1; Windows Vista SP1, and Windows XP SP3.

Host server Oses now include 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2008 standard, enterprise and data center editions in some languages (English, German).

Microsoft is banking big that its virtualization game plan will take share from market leader VMware and also bring new users into the virtualization fold.

Microsoft says it’s on track to deliver Hyper-V by August.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

Is VMware in trouble? Consider:

Last week, the server virtualization market share leader’s stock price closed at $51.45. The last time the stock was that low: Aug. 14, 2007, the day of VMware’s IPO.

A Yankee Group analyst recently compared VMware to the New England Patriots, who got off to a perfect start but couldn’t win the ultimate prize. Those comments appeared in a Network World story analyzing the threats to VMware’s dominance. Judging by the length of that article (2,500 words plus), there are a whole lotta threats.

And, as I reported today, there’s turmoil in VMware’s partner program. Complaints about channel conflict, poor communication and shrinking margins are not what VMware needs right now. Facing its toughest challenge yet, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, VMware will have to rely on partners to recruit new customers and keep existing ones happy. That won’t happen if the partners themselves aren’t happy.

VMware just announced its first true partner conference, Partner Xchange 2008, which will combine the pre-VMworld Partner Day and the annual TSX partner training into one three-day event. It will be interesting to see what VMware does between now and then to address partners’ problems, or the company could have some explaining to do come May in San Diego.

EMC is buying Pi Corp., and Pi’s founder, Paul Maritz, will now head EMC’s software-as-a-service effort. The news was reported by The New York Times and others.

And it is extremely interesting news. Maritz was a well-regarded top Microsoft exec for 14 years before taking his act on the road.

In its earlier “about” statement on the company Web site , Pi said its “next generation software environment” was expected to be available in both “free (open source) and licensed forms.” That open source verbiage is now only viewable in a cache. Hmmm.

Note: Pi ’s environment was going to help “users create, repurpose, store, share and access personal information in novel ways.” (Personal Information = PI. )

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.