VMware, the current leader in the virtualisation arena, claimed today that it is unfazed by Microsoft's unveiling of its rival Hyper-V platform.

Richard Garsthagen, EMEA product marketing manager for enterprise desktops at VMware, told vnunet.com at the TechEd IT Forum in Barcelona that the company's focus goes "far beyond the virtualisation layer by addressing and solving business problems with applications that are built on top of the virtualisation layer".

Garsthagen cited VMware's VMotion and Site Recovery Manager as products that use the basis of a virtualised environment to solve some of the major problems faced by businesses of all sizes.

He also showcased VMware's distributed power management which enables companies easily to move virtual machines onto fewer physical servers during low-load periods and then power down the unused machines.

Garsthagen added that some customers prefer the idea of an operating system-independent virtualisation tool as they question how strongly Microsoft will support operating systems that are not its own.

VMware will continue to work on its hypervisor and will continue to give it away for free. Garsthagen argued that the real benefit to customers and VMware is the value added by applications that take advantage of the benefits of virtualisation.

Garsthagen referred to Oracle's recent virtualisation announcement with Oracle VM, maintaining that this was an idea that VMware has been pushing for some time, what he called a 'Just Enough Operating System'.

He explained that in deployments where a virtual or physical server is going to run only the applications to perform a single task, there is no need for an entire operating system to be installed as it only adds complexity and unnecessary maintenance.

Further down the line Garsthagen sees this concept being expanded to the point where customers can be offered virtual machines tailored to the requirements of each specific task with little or no extraneous parts added.