Can VMware Workstation 8 be a boost for Hyper-V adoption? And ESXi 5?

A very controversial title I know, but please hold your fire and let me explain.

After reading in the Veeam blog a very good article from Rick El-Qasem, fellow vExpert and a rockstar working for Veeam, an idea came to my head.

For many of us, the members of the VMware Community, VMware Workstation was and is one of the ways we use to learn and play with our favorite Virtualization goodies. I personally have it installed in my laptop and use it everyday to try customer setups at small scale, perform tests and try new stuff I learn in one of the many products from VMware and many others I have installed, from ESX 3.5 to ESXi 5.0, vCenter, vMA, VDR, HP P4000 VSAs, etc.

However until very recently for a newcomer to the Virtualization world that really wanted to learn Hyper-V the only way was to get a couple of systems and some kind of shared storage compatible with MSCS.

Now, ironically thanks to VMware, that situation has changed. In fact it has dramatically improved because now a folk that want to learn how things are done in the Hyper-V world has VMware Workstation 8 and the free edition of ESXi 5 at his disposal where he can run Hyper-V nested and even power-on VMs.

With a moderately powerful whitebox running free ESXi5 or a workstation-class system running Workstation 8, and a MSDN subscription, a Sysadmin can try very complex setups in his homelab that will improve his Hyper-V skills. And that can be a great asset for Microsoft in the same way it was for VMware.

I have to admit that no matter how much I like VMware I will use that solution to learn a bit of Hyper-V… but that will be after I get my VCP5 by the end of the year ;-)

So, what do you think. Will VMware new star products be helpful for Hyper-V adoption since now more Windows Sysadmins can learn Microsoft hypervisor? Or this wouldn’t affect and VMware vSphere will reign all over the Data Center until the end of the days?

Please comment! :)

Juanma.