Cisco will not move IOS into a VM, but you can get what Cisco IOS does in a VM with open source Vyatta
Virtualization has changed the game in many layers of the data center. One important piece of the data center stack that has not been available is Cisco’s IOS. According to Vyatta CEO Kelly Herrell it won’t be available anytime soon either. This is perfectly OK with him too. In the meantime Vyatta offers its community an open source and commercially licensed product which does much of what IOS does and is available to run in a virtual environment.
Vyatta has been offering an open source virtualized router solution since 2008. At this point they have over 600,000 downloads and over 1000 paying customers. While there are other router manufacturers in the market like Juniper and 3Com, Herrell says they have never been the competition for Vyatta. Almost from day one, Cisco has been the competition. Herrell and Vyatta don’t want people to look at the router market as one of many solutions. To them there is the closed source Cisco and the open source Vyatta.
In the meantime Herrell says that Cisco faces the classical innovators dilemma. They can’t keep up with Moore’s Law in in terms of hardware power increasing. Even if they do call themselves a software company, Cisco is about hardware and closed black box hardware at that.
That was why in Herrell’s mind an open source strategy was the only way to take on Cisco. How else to take on that marketing machine and get Vyatta into as many hands as possible. But even Herrell admits that the open source version of Vyatta is great for an eval, but for real life network, you probably would want the commercial version of the product.
I thought that was interesting for Herrell to admit. In my own 10 commandments of Open Core, one of them says the open source version can’t be crippled. While the open source version of Vyatta is not necessarily crippled, their CEO admitting that a real life network would probably want to use the commercial version is a bit disheartening.
At the end of the day though, maybe more than open source, virtualization is what is driving Vyatta’s growth. Herrell says that virtually every Tier 1 customer and partner using Vyatta is doing so because of its virtualization abilities.
So maybe Cisco should heed Herrell’s advice and make a virtualized version of IOS available. Then again, if that happens maybe you should get the Devil a pair of ice skates.
