Virtual Server Ownage

Info Week magazine did an article on infrastructure as a service. You know. This is where you rent out CPU processing power. The sad part of the story was that less than 10% of the people surveyed were using Microsoft's Virtual Server.

The majority of respondents use either VMware or Xen hypervisor. I guess VMware beat the rest of the industry to market. And the Xen hypervisor gets zen points for being open source. Even if Microsoft provides a free alternative, it is hard to get market share.

Renting CPU power is cheap. The article I read said you could get time rented for as little as 1.5 cents/hour/CPU. Delicious. People like this renting to do web hosting, testing, and development. There are still concerns over security when you apps run on somebody else's box in the cloud. However I wonder how Microsoft can get more people to use Virtual Server. Why do they need to do? Buy VMware?