The battle between VMWare and Microsoft rages on with VMWare taking a lot standing history of strong VM management and pointing much of their strength towards VDI. Microsoft on the other hand has reached out to the world and looked to open their environment up to the cloud.
It almost feels like Microsoft has been looking into the Linux playbook and decided that sharing is caring, perhaps they learned from Vista that you cannot slam down a solution without crushing a few fingers, so it is better to get those hands to help you upfront!
When you look at the two head to head it is easy to see that VMWare has a strong solution when it comes to extending the VMWare environment into the cloud. You can go to a lot of places and grab storage and manage it inside of VMWare, for companies that have a huge investment into VMWare, this might be the way to go for DR. As long as all you want to keep in house is VMWare.
Microsoft, on the other hand, allows you to manage Hyper-V and VMWare and their cloud solutions run the gambit from hosting SharePoint, instant messaging, and/or email all the way through custom application hosting and full infrastructure as a service. (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS).
What both do well is present a hybrid solution for VM management. Allowing you to move between on-premise and cloud based VM storage with ease. This is in no small part due to the amazing leaps forward Microsoft has made in Hyper-V over the past few years. They went from a poor man's VM host to an enterprise class solution almost over night.
Check out this article on Microsoft leaping ahead of VMWare in hybrid cloud management for more: http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/240153005/microsoft-leaps-ahead-of-vmware-in-hybrid-cloud-management.htm;jsessionid=GgQXhFXLC9n7-keSG2xtqQ**.ecappj03?pgno=2
