There’s Billy Connolly sample which I’ve had on my PC for ages. To use it recently at Virtualization events Steve Lamb had to edit 3 rude works out of 12 seconds.

We want this, and that,
We demand a share in that and most of that.
Some of this and **** all of that
Less of that and more of this and **** plenty of this.

And another thing. I want it now.
I want it yesterday, and I want more tomorrow.
And the demands will all be changed then so ***** stay awake

Now…  if I worked on the Virtual Machine Manager team, that might be how I viewed the demands of the rest of the company…. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when they were setting out their plans in 2006/7

• We need you to write something to manage VMs. And we need it … soon as you can really.
• You need to support Virtual Server because that’s shipping today.
  The API for Hyper-V is totally different and you’ll need to support that when it ships…. so better plan for a V2
  Oh … could you make it extensible and think about adding VMware support while you’re at it.
• Physical to Virtual Migration is a nasty problem: go back and look at that one would you ?
  While you’re looking at that see if you can translate a VMware disk to a Microsoft one.
• Setting up VMs from a library on the best suited host them isn’t straight forward either, so see what you can do..
• Letting users access create and access VMs via a web portal would be ideal
  Hyper-V doesn’t expose the access control for VMs so if you;ll need to sort that out first
• You’d better make it scriptable. No messing about, it needs to be done with PowerShell
• We think High Availability will be big so make sure you can hook into cluster technologies.
• These VM files are kinda huge so see if you can find a way of copying them in inside a SAN.
• You need to fit it into the System Center family,
  in fact it would be great idea if you could make suggestions based on what the rest of system center sees .
• Oh and Hyper-V is going to ship about 6 months after longhorn server, and there will be a Longhorn Server R2 about 18 months after that
  Go see the Hyper-V guys and see what they have up their sleeves for that one and start planning a V3. 

This kind of thing would merit a response with more swear words than a box-set of Billy Connolly: The SCVMM team said “OK”,(was there a lot of swearing first ?) And 13 months  after shipping their 2007 version, the 2008 version Released To Manufacturing today (See Zane’s post here),  It now manages Hyper-V and VMWare, and has added additional key features like Cluster support, Delegated Administration and resource optimization with “PRO” –I love the joined-upness of pro “Operations manager says it looks like this Machine needs to go off line, do you want to start moving VMs off it ?”

I don’t want to give the impression of belittling the work of the Hyper-V team; but in a sense the job of their product is to just blend into the infrastructure, to become invisible,become a given like file sharing. What’s going to matter to customers in 2 or 3 or 5 years is not what they use to do virtualization (Microsoft/VMware/Citrix/whoever) but how well they manage the whole environment where virtualization is in use, from Hardware to the Application in the Guest OS. In that sense SCVMM is the more important product. Virtualization is moving from the early-adopters to mainstream use but today the entrenched VMware customers I meet are – almost by definition - early adopters of virtualization. They’ve listened to stuff about Hyper-V and said yes it’s all very nice but we’ve got VMware, we know where we are with it, and don’t feel like making a strategic change just yet. Then they see SCVMM and before I can get into the business of “Now, you need this because …” their reaction is “We know why we we need it. When can we get it and how much does it cost”. Today (eval here)  and less than you might expect.