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Why Dell’s EMC Bid Leaves VMware Looking Like Devalued Currency

dogma1138 11y ago
I'm pretty VMWare's stock devalued it self. VMW Workstation is still the best out there in desktop visualization, but VMware has been losing market share to Microsoft and FOSS software the likes of Xen for some years now. HyperV is essentially free in the MSFT ecosystem, and thanks to Amazon and other cloud providers opensource hyper-visors especially those based on Xen and KVM these days are mature enough and have a good enough eco-system for large scale enterprise deployments. Docker and other containerization solutions have also took a big chunk of VMWares potential market space in the enterprise market. Add to that that allot of VMWare's technology the likes of ThinApp never panned out really and the free version of vSphere Hypervisor has now enough "enterprise" features to be an actual viable solution for production VMWare hasn't been looking that good for quite a while. They still make great products but I'm not sure they had a clear business plan and a killer app for a while now.
- ckozlowski 11y ago
  I agree with a lot of this. I definitely feel as though they're getting a lot of pressure from the cloud providers by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. VMware of course is starting their own offering, but it's a fork-lift of vCloud. VMware, in my opinion, is still the best as providing a shop with the tools to create their own IaaS. They've the best hypervisor and the best tools. But the number of organizations that /need/ their own private cloud is diminishing, and I feel like the hyper-converged players like Nutanix are rapidly catching up with them. (When I saw the Acropolis announcement, I thought, "Well, that's it.") Running your own datacenter is hard, and expensive, and people are gonna want to get away from it. It was great a decade ago when we were first discovering virtualization, but we're moving beyond IaaS now. AWS and Azure offer more than just virtualization, they're offering a platform. There's a growth path beyond IaaS for their offerings, whereas VMware will be entrenched in the IaaS space for a long while. I'm a virtual infrastructure engineer by trade, and I work exclusively with VMware (right now). It's great tech, but it's yesterday's tech.
  - hhandoko 11y ago
    Is there a big gap between the best hypervisor and the free one? i.e. VMware (Workstation / Fusion) vs Virtualbox I use Vagrant + Ansible for dev work, do you think it's worth it to spend a bit of money to pay for VMware and its Vagrant provider?
    - dogma1138 11y ago
      Depends what is the host and the guest, Virtual box works pretty well on most hosts but the guest quality for Windows hosts is still questionably although it has generally improved. If you need 3D acceleration especially with Windows guests then it's pretty much VMware for either Mac, Windows or Linux or Parallels for Mac. Performance wise VMware is still quite faster than VirtualBox in most cases and if you need to run a fairly complicated virtual network than VMware is pretty much your only the way to go. When it comes to a Windows host if you have the pro version of Windows you get HyperV which as long as you don't need a complicated network is actually better than VMware workstation in many aspects, it's linux support is lacking but if you only run popular distro's like Ubuntu you should be fine. HyperV is much better in terms of performance in edge cases, and it also more gentle when it comes to power consumption so it won't kill your laptop's battery as much as VMware workstation.
    - ckozlowski 11y ago
      If you're looking at a single, stand alone hypervisor, then the differences are not enormous. You could pick your flavor based on whatever you're comfortable with. When you're looking at larger scale and the potential for unique and/or fringe cases goes up, then support for those becomes a differentiator. VMware rather excels here I think, with support for device pass-through and higher resource limits. GPU acceleration, Raw Device Mapping, are some of the ones I can think of. A little past that and it's interaction between hypervisors. ESXi and KVM will do live migration, but KVM doesn't have DRS (yet). I don't think Hyper-V has storage live migration yet, but ESXi does. And so on. They'll all catch up, I've no doubt. I'm particularly interested to see Nutanix with their Acropolis/KVM hypervisor gain these features. But right now, ESXi is in the lead.

I'm pretty VMWare's stock devalued it self. VMW Workstation is still the best out there in desktop visualization, but VMware has been losing market share to Microsoft and FOSS software the likes of Xen for some years now. HyperV is essentially free in the MSFT ecosystem, and thanks to Amazon and other cloud providers opensource hyper-visors especially those based on Xen and KVM these days are mature enough and have a good enough eco-system for large scale enterprise deployments. Docker and other containerization solutions have also took a big chunk of VMWares potential market space in the enterprise market. Add to that that allot of VMWare's technology the likes of ThinApp never panned out really and the free version of vSphere Hypervisor has now enough "enterprise" features to be an actual viable solution for production VMWare hasn't been looking that good for quite a while. They still make great products but I'm not sure they had a clear business plan and a killer app for a while now.

ckozlowski 11y ago
I agree with a lot of this. I definitely feel as though they're getting a lot of pressure from the cloud providers by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. VMware of course is starting their own offering, but it's a fork-lift of vCloud. VMware, in my opinion, is still the best as providing a shop with the tools to create their own IaaS. They've the best hypervisor and the best tools. But the number of organizations that /need/ their own private cloud is diminishing, and I feel like the hyper-converged players like Nutanix are rapidly catching up with them. (When I saw the Acropolis announcement, I thought, "Well, that's it.") Running your own datacenter is hard, and expensive, and people are gonna want to get away from it. It was great a decade ago when we were first discovering virtualization, but we're moving beyond IaaS now. AWS and Azure offer more than just virtualization, they're offering a platform. There's a growth path beyond IaaS for their offerings, whereas VMware will be entrenched in the IaaS space for a long while. I'm a virtual infrastructure engineer by trade, and I work exclusively with VMware (right now). It's great tech, but it's yesterday's tech.
- hhandoko 11y ago
  Is there a big gap between the best hypervisor and the free one? i.e. VMware (Workstation / Fusion) vs Virtualbox I use Vagrant + Ansible for dev work, do you think it's worth it to spend a bit of money to pay for VMware and its Vagrant provider?
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    Depends what is the host and the guest, Virtual box works pretty well on most hosts but the guest quality for Windows hosts is still questionably although it has generally improved. If you need 3D acceleration especially with Windows guests then it's pretty much VMware for either Mac, Windows or Linux or Parallels for Mac. Performance wise VMware is still quite faster than VirtualBox in most cases and if you need to run a fairly complicated virtual network than VMware is pretty much your only the way to go. When it comes to a Windows host if you have the pro version of Windows you get HyperV which as long as you don't need a complicated network is actually better than VMware workstation in many aspects, it's linux support is lacking but if you only run popular distro's like Ubuntu you should be fine. HyperV is much better in terms of performance in edge cases, and it also more gentle when it comes to power consumption so it won't kill your laptop's battery as much as VMware workstation.
  - ckozlowski 11y ago
    If you're looking at a single, stand alone hypervisor, then the differences are not enormous. You could pick your flavor based on whatever you're comfortable with. When you're looking at larger scale and the potential for unique and/or fringe cases goes up, then support for those becomes a differentiator. VMware rather excels here I think, with support for device pass-through and higher resource limits. GPU acceleration, Raw Device Mapping, are some of the ones I can think of. A little past that and it's interaction between hypervisors. ESXi and KVM will do live migration, but KVM doesn't have DRS (yet). I don't think Hyper-V has storage live migration yet, but ESXi does. And so on. They'll all catch up, I've no doubt. I'm particularly interested to see Nutanix with their Acropolis/KVM hypervisor gain these features. But right now, ESXi is in the lead.