Looks like Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols from eWeek sees the writing on the walls.
Is VMWare a Dead Duck?
Microsoft, Red Hat, Citrix, Novell and now Oracle are all offering free or open-source virtualization of one sort or another. Can VMware survive?
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2216435,00.aspThis market space is evolving so rapidly. Why would any company ‘bet the farm’ on one virtualization technology and rush into virtualizing their infrastructure when this technology hasn’t matured yet? Buying virtualization products today is like buying a car in a town where there’s only one car dealership. All the cars sold are bare bones Chevrolet Pick-up trucks and everything sold is an additional nickel-and-dime option that you have to pay for.
Meanwhile look at the "new dealerships" that are opening up just over the horizon:
- Microsoft’s Hyper-V
Microsoft’s virtualization hypervisor has a negligible cost associated with it while providing better performance than traditional virtualization technologies. Additionally, it’s compatibility with all Windows Server hardware platforms make it the easy choice for customers looking to virtualize their datacenter on the hardware that they’ve already chosen – as opposed to being forced to purchase specific servers in which VMWare has developed drivers for.
Because VMWare has it’s own proprietary driver model, you can not use Windows drivers for VMWare ESX – it requires that a custom driver be available for the hardware platform you are to virtualize on.
…meanwhile all servers that support Windows Server can leverage Hyper-V.- XenSource
Open Source virtualization has collaborated to standardize with Microsoft on a set of virtualization formats and interfaces to insure management tool interoperability and performance making XenSource a perfect solution for traditional "UNIX shops".- Virtualization-on-hardware
Intel & AMD are all working on virtualization-done-in-hardware where all virtualization operations are handled in a chip. This is a magnitude of power greater than today’s piddly "VT" technologies that are in today’s processors which simply assist virtualization software. How long before the entire market of core virtualization software rendered moot?IT Managers that decide against rushing into this market just so that they can "virtualize their datacenter" regardless of the costs of doing so and regardless of how the market evolves toward a low-to-no cost virtualization technology strategy will find themselves poised as visionaries and keen strategists in comparison to those that rushed to implement a virtualization architecture.
The cost of virtualization software will be one of the first things people consider cutting when they look at cost mitigation within IT.