Virtualization's changing state a problem for VMware

In case you needed any more evidence that basic virtualization capabilities were becoming a commodity, Dell has announced a wave of servers and services designed to "simplify the deployment and management of virtualization in enterprises of any size," per a company press release.

Leave aside for the moment the questionable proposition that hardware needs to be extensively customized for virtual environments. Other than virtualization-specific chips and extra-beefy I/O specs or extra RAM, there's not a lot you need to do to a server to make it a decent host for virtual machines. That's the whole idea: having to buy extra-special hardware for virtual-server installations would negate much of the cost- and administration-savings virtualization is supposed to deliver.

Let's focus more on the phrase "enterprises of any size," by which Dell means the mid-sized companies likely to buy the $6,000 servers it's pushing with this announcement, not the large companies that have been driving the virtual-server market by consolidating lots of $6,000 servers onto much larger machines.

"Enterprises of any size," when that size is larger than a few hundred employees, don't buy servers by logging onto Dell.com to run the capacity planning and configuration management applications that the company brags about later in the release.

Mid-market companies do, however. Mid-market companies that don't have the staff or time or IT budget to do a lot of custom app dev or hardware integration or data-center construction or management.

Those companies, by and large, don't buy cutting-edge technology. They buy cutting-budget technology, which is what virtualization has become.

That's good news for mid-market companies and for large companies, in that the hardware and software available for virtual-server environments is becoming more common, more stable and less expensive.

The tools to manage those installations are also becoming more common and more capable. Rather than have one harried admin at a console trying to track down an errant VM, there are tools available to automatically monitor, provision, manage or kill VMs as needed.

It's bad news for VMware, which is still counting to a disturbing degree on its hypervisor to keep it ahead of competitors like Microsoft and, increasingly, every other operating system or server-manufacturer out there.

"We have never believed that the hypervisor would be commoditized," VMware director of marketing Ben Matheson told Computerworld's Rob Mitchell recently. "To imply that it's a commodity would imply that there's no differentiation."

Bingo. Right now there is some differentiation, and will continue to be for another year or so, until Microsoft's Hyper-V really gets its legs. After that, Microsoft's Hyper-V will be a credible choice for IT managers counting on not being fired for buying technology from an industry leader, whether it works best or not.

For others, who make choices based more on technical merit than intangibles like market leadership, third-party support or the quality of the golf outings vendor reps take them on, it will become increasingly clear that VMware and its premium prices are facing withering competition not only from Microsoft, but also from Citrix and the half-dozen other major companies offering implementations of the open-source Xen hypervisor, often bundled and specially integrated with their own hardware.