VMware is definitely in a rough spot, but not necessarily a bad one. I hear all this talk about wallstreet being upset. The greed aspect might be upsetting if you're greedy, but to me this is more of a realistic market correction.
VMware was the Zar of the virtual world, and now there are competing kingdoms. If they want to survive they will most definitely have to address their pricing, and application virtualization for that matter.
Still, VMotion rocks. VMware has great managment tools, and in my opinion, doesn't talk about that enough.
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VMware's advantages over Microsoft
We received a response to this story via e-mail and are posting it here with the sender's permission:
I was reading Jon Brodkin's article in the July 14, 2008, issue about the CEO change at VMware.
In my opinion I feel that Jon does not understand the technical advantages of VMware over Microsoft. He is making the assumption that Microsoft has won the virtualization war due to price. He is making an apples-to-oranges comparison. He stated that Hyper-V is free with Windows Server 2008. You still have to buy Windows Server 2008 to get the free Hyper-V to put on the server that you are going to use for virtualization. We have an EA with Microsoft so I would still have to pay $954 for the Windows server to put Hyper-V on. He priced the ESXi at $495. It seems to me ESXi is half the price of Microsoft.
VMware also offers a free version on VMware, which is VMware Server that can be loaded on Windows server. Now that’s an apples-to-apples comparison. VMware has VMware ESXi and VMware Infrastructure Enterprise (VIE) and Microsoft has nothing to compare with them at this time. ESX is its own OS that sits on the hardware. What this gives you is better performance per virtualized machine. With Hyper-V you have performance requirements for the basic 2008 server and then the Hyper-V application that is running on top of that base server. ESX has optimized the OS before you start using the Virtual Machines.
We are a hospital that runs 24/7 and we are also a Microsoft shop; we have about 90 Microsoft servers in our environment. Of these 90 server we have about 60 that virtualized into a VMware Infrastructure Enterprise. Even now we would not use Microsoft due the performance advantages of VMware Infrastructure, High Availability (HA), VMotion, and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). With these systems we can insure that we are up at all times.
I am sure that the change in leadership will be a good thing but, in my opinion, Microsoft has a long way to get where VMware is at today. VMware must not lose its focus or it will lose out to Microsoft. If you are a small organization Hyper-V may work for you. If and when Microsoft can provide something comparable to VIE we would look at it. Next time, please make sure you show an accurate comparison between the 2 products. You can’t compare the speed and quality of a Yugo to a BMW.
- Mark Rose
Response to Mark Rose
Thanks, Mark, for your comment. I believe you are mistaken in saying that "Jon does not understand the technical advantages of VMware over Microsoft."
I would like to direct you to this story published on June 26, written by me, with the headline "VMware trumps Hyper-V on functionality, but not on price."
Here is a link to the story: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/062608-vmware-hyperv.html?page=1
The article explains VMware's technology advantages, which I am well aware of. As I reported in my story, these technology advantages include live migration, the ability to move an application running on a virtual server from one physical device to another, as well as "hot add," the ability to add memory to a virtual server while it's running.
It also discusses the free VMware Server you mentioned in your comment, which you may have thought we were not aware of.
While Mr. Rose's response appears to be specifically directed at the story on VMware's ouster of Diane Greene, a thorough look at the totality of my reporting will show that I have not ignored the issues Mark Rose raises and am well aware of them. Thanks for reading.
-Jon Brodkin
Senior Writer
Network World