The capability to overcommit memory is an evident advantage that VMware has over competition.
Marketing departments, partners, and even customers engage endless debates about its value and usefulness in every scenario.
Microsoft has been particularly vocal in downplaying the importance of memory overcommitment, even if its President of Server and Tools Division, Bob Muglia, candidly admitted:
we definitely need to put that in our product.
Maybe just a few people remind that Microsoft actually equipped its hypervisor with memory overcommitment capability and that was ready to appear in Hyper-V 2008 R2.
For some reasons anyway the company pulled the feature during the beta phase without disclosing when customers would finally get it.
The time is about to come, apparently.
After the launch of Windows 7, of course Microsoft is already working on Windows Server 2008 R2 post-RTM builds and Internet abounds of leaked screenshots about those.
One of them, published by Softpedia and related to the build 7700.winmain.100122-1900, reveals that Microsoft has reintroduced Dynamic Memory controls in the Hyper-V control panel:
This doesn’t really mean that the feature will appear in the next Windows Server 2008 R2 service pack or in Windows Server codename 8, but its presence in this build confirms that Microsoft is getting ready to reintroduce it.
At this point it will be hard to argue with VMware on the value of memory overcommitment (albeit it still makes sense to believe that it’s not useful in every scenario).