"I used to enjoy covering VMware," laments Ashlee Vance in a blog posting at the Channel Register. "In the good old days, CEO Diane Greene would stop by the office to chat about everything, ... She never tried to oversell the products. She embraced a humble, intelligent approach to discussing VMware's products and plans."
But, after last weeks' VMworld conference in San Francisco and VMware’s splashy IPO (“documented here in pornographic detail,” Ashlee says), there is nothing humble left about VMware. When you become a rival of Microsoft, that’s when you’ve really made it.Today, Microsoft's marketing machine is all about the "hey, we have time" - asserting that only five percent of servers use virtualization.
"As best as I can tell, Microsoft relies on 2005 data from a large analyst house to back up this statement. Even if it doesn't, the point is muted by the fact that VMware has already inserted itself into the consciousness of server customers everywhere."
Nevertheless, none of VMware's market lead might mount to a hill of beans when Microsoft does enter the market. It can tweak its operating system to dance beautifully with Viridian. It can embed virtualization software in its operating system for free. (If its antitrust problems don't prevent that, but given that Red Hat and Novell include server virtualization in their products, it is likely that Microsoft will do the same).
VMware's best defense will be ESX Server 3i:
"a 32MB version of its flagship product that can and will be embedded into the flash memory of servers. Dell, IBM, HP, Fujitsu and others have lined up to include ESX 3i in the memory of at least one system each. So, you can boot right into VMware without touching an operating system, and VMware's hypervisor starts to look like a standard server component."
The question is ... will server managers want to deal with a more complex hardware component for virtualization, complete with management tools? Or, providing Viridian works as advertised, will they be content to simply manage virtualization via familiar Windows methodology?
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...if people want free hypervisors, they can have them now. MSFT hypervisor will be another in the pile. It's what the combination of virtualized systems can do that attracts attention and dollars. VMotion, DRS, and HA have shown that. Just providing a hypervisor isn't enough.
Datacenter managers will be quite happy to have virtualization built right into the hardware. Few managers are interested in spending time installing software. Having it already there, ready to go to work, is a time saving advantage. Also, not having to attend to all of the configuration steps required of a general purpose OS like Windows minimizes errors and increases the security of the system.
Microsoft could indeed tweak Windows to "dance" with Viridian. The engineers at VMware are not fools, though, and determine the extent of those tweaks quite quickly. Hobbling Windows to only work well on Windows would be of little, short term advantage, and would antagonize the 20,000 enterprise customers using VMware, which includes all of the Fortune 100.
"outshine" vmware - with what product? - 3i is real and amazing!
I don't see how we could sit here and say that Microsoft's hypervisor will "outshine" vmware. Forgive the pun but the Microsoft hypervisor, to this point is just "hype". I mean, they don't have a real product. Their product is delayed and they keep reducing what it will do whenever it is eventually released.
On the other hand, VMware has a real product, in use by a huge customer base, with rich & mature features, their own VMware certified professional program, and a huge conference packed with attendees. In fact, Microsoft was at that conference trying to promise that they will someday have a product. How pathetic is that?
Don't get me wrong, I love Microsoft products but I think it is very premature to predict that Microsoft's non-existant product will take over the virtualization marketplace.
I have been trying VMware ESX 3i Server - the take on ESX without the service console. It's 32MB hypervisor boots in 2 minute with zero install. Shoot - Microsoft can't even make a patch that is 32MB.
In fact, I have even got ESX 3i to boot and run inside VMware Workstation on my Windows XP PC. I made a 16 minute training video that steps you through how to do this and posted it on my website.
I hope that it will help others test and try out VMware ESX Server 3i Beta. It is an amazing way to run ESX & use virtualization.
The URL for the video is - http://www.happyrouter.com/esx3ibetavideo
David Davis
Author of the
Train Signal VMware Workstation & Server video series
short term versus long term
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This seems like it will be Microsoft's market to own or kill. Not the week Viridian ships. Not even the year it ships. But why should this market be the only one to defy the laws of Moore? VMware is installed everywhere now and works great. But in this industry the one with the disruptive technology wins -- until the next disruption.
If this follows the typical course, the advantage VMware has with an installed base is only good for three years or so, until companies refresh their hardware. At that point, if Viridian does work well, has a VMotion component and is otherwise easy to manage (that's a big IF, too, with Microsoft), then VMware's best shot is to get itself under the OS in the hardware. Not that VMware will go away -- there will always be folks that prefer it. But companies bought VMware for the cost savings of server consolidation. Those have been had. In the future there are going to have to be good business reasons to continue to fork out big licensing fees for virtualization instead of using the virtualization built into the OS.