VMware Slams Rivals' Virtualization Strategy
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VMware president questions wisdom of integrating virtualization functionality into operating systems.
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Raises white paper with ball of fluff In classic Redmond fashion, Microsoft has countered VMware's charges of anticompetitive practices in the server virtualization market by heaving a giant ball of fluff at reporters.â¦
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Blog: A developer writes that virtualization represents a threat to Microsoft's control of the desktop and licensing restrictions are one way to try to maintain its grip.
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VMware offers its app free, but competitors ask whether it treats all virtualization products equally.
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Blog: Virtualization services are expected to turn into a $11.7 billion market by 2011, more than double its current level, according to an IDC report. VMware and its competitors are helping to drive this demand.
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Fun while it lasted The VMware orgasm officially ended Monday, as the virtualization software maker revealed that it could no longer match "the market's" lofty expectations.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - As large enterprises embrace the concept of virtualization to more efficiently manage their information technology systems, vendors are now targeting the small-to-medium size market. VMwareÂ on Monday is introducing a new low-cost service plan to give small-to-medium businesses (SMB) a taste of what virtualization can do for them. It's entry level bundle includes a free download of the VMware Server software for virtualizing servers and a $1,500 support plan called Virtual Center. Although less than the $5,000 support program for enterprise customers, the $1,500 support plan is limited to three two-socket physical servers that could be converted into multiple virtual servers. If an SMB customer wants to virtualize more servers, the support would cost an extra $400 for each extra server. Virtualization refers to the practice of managing a data center holistically to make the best use of the hardware available, reduce the capital cost of new servers and the operational cost of electricity to run them. Virtualization software like VMware Server makes it possible for one server to run multiple software applications at the same time. VMware sees growth potential in the SMB market, given that 70 percent of 1.2 million downloads of the free VMware Server software since June 2006 have been to SMB customers, said Ben Matheson, vice president of product management for VMware, a division of storage vendor EMC. He defines small-to-medium businesses as those with fewer than 1,000 employees or an average of 100 physical servers in their businesses. "There is a lot of market awareness of the value of virtualization in the enterprise...but we think it's useful for all companies," said Matheson. He anticipates many of the SMBs downloading the free VMware Server are just taking virtualization out for a test drive. "There are definitely a lot of trials, getting it into their labs and using things like virtual appliances and testing them. But there is also quite a bit of production use," he said. Server vendors have also been making overtures to the SMB market. Hewlett-Packard began offeringÂ a Virtualization Assessment Service on Feb. 1 to analyze an IT infrastructure to see how it might benefit from virtualization. The service is being offered through HP's resellers who typically serve its SMB customers, while HP's own sales and engineering force tends to large enterprise customers. IBM even calls its initiative a "Virtualization Test Drive." IBM launched in 2006 a virtualization education and sales initiative targeted at SMBs. IBM said that more than 65 percent of their virtualization sales are driven by IBM partners targeting SMBs.
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(InfoWorld) - VMware co-founder Mendel Rosenblum has poured tepid water on the recent acquisition of open-source virtualization vendor XenSource by remote desktop company Citrix as well as outlining his demands to the chip vendors. He made his remarks during an exclusive interview with Techworld at virtualization industry event VMworld, during which he also outlined what additional support for virtualization he wants the chip vendors to provide. Commenting from a technology perspective on the Citrix buy-out, which was announced last month, Rosenblum said: "If I were in Citrix's shoes, would I have gone in that direction? There is a layer to control -- I can see it from that point of view as they've long suffered from being on top of Microsoft.... I can see why they might do it, but there are a lot of challenges." Rosenblum also laid out a blueprint for some of the issues he'd like to see the AMD and Intel tackle. He said that VMware didn't always get what it wanted from the processor makers and that VMware needed more visibility into how virtual machines use the processor cache in order to provide better quality of service. In particular, he referred to the problem of a VM demanding huge amounts of processor resource that affected other processor cores. He said: "We've made great steps, but if you have a 10-gig NIC with tiny packets coming, it can consume a whole CPU just looking at each of them, so it's really difficult trying to match line rate." Rosenblum also claimed that his comments about virtualization being a threat to Windows were taken out of context. He said: "Journalists like to put things in headlines that I actually didn't say.... The point was that once you have the virtualization layer driving the hardware, that's taken away some of the functionality of the OS, which gives the OS a chance to focus on its other major goal, which is still very much needed in the application environment. So where modern OSes have gone is to control hardware and the application and are running into a dead end."
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Attempting to move in on Parallels' turf, VMware on Tuesday announced the pre-order for a previously announced product that allows users to run any x86 operating system simultaneously.
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(InfoWorld) - Two makers of virtualization software for running the Windows operating system on Apple's computers have issued dueling upgrades this week. VMware said Friday it's going to release sometime in June a beta 2 upgrade to itsÂ VMware virtualization software for the Mac, code-named Fusion. It will be an upgrade to the desktop virtualization for Macs product it first introduced in April 2006. Rival ParallelsÂ unveiled an updateÂ to its Desktop for Macs software on Feb. 27. Both use virtualization to run Microsoft's Windows on an Apple computer and make it possible for the user to switch from Mac to Windows without having to reboot. Among the improvements in VMware's Fusion is its ability to run Windows-designed 3-D gaming software on a Mac, said Dan Chu, VMware's vice president of emerging products and markets. "There's been a ton of traffic about this on the blogs," said Chu, about discussions by end-users anticipating the beta 2 release. Chu also noted that Fusion will be able to run software programs written in the 64-bit and 32-bit encryption protocols, while Parallels only supports the older 32-bit standard. True, admits Benjamin Rudolph, a Parallels spokesman, but said his company will add the 64-bit standard in its upgrade, due later this year. It will also offer the 3-D graphics capability Fusion, announced Friday. But a key feature of the new Parallels Desktop announced Tuesday is a program it calls Coherence, which runs Windows applications on Mac's OS X as though they were native. When users switch to Coherence mode, Rudolph said, the Windows desktop disappears but Windows applications, such as Word, Outlook or Internet Explorer run on the Mac desktop and their icons appear in the Mac application dock. "Coherence in particular, speaks to the innovation we put out here at Parallels," he said. "That's something nobody really has done before." Fusion also enables merging of Mac and Windows applications, but "it has a different user interface" than Parallels, said Chu. The Mac desktop will be visible and a Windows window will open in a portion of the screen from which the Windows applications can be launched. Although VMware is clearly the industry leader in virtualization, it's largely focused on enterprise virtualization of servers. Parallels focuses on the niche Fusion is going after, that of running Windows on a Mac. "I think we're far ahead of them on virtualizing the Mac," Rudolph said. Parallels' newest version of its Mac product lists for $79.99, although existing users can download the upgrade for free. VMware's currently available version is free, but Chu would not disclose the price at which VMware's beta 2 will sell when it hits the market.
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Both VMWare and Parallels update their virtualization software.
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VMware hosts a San Francisco conference focused on the multi-OS software technology that's all the rage.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft has laid out plans to become a bigger force in the market for virtualization software, stepping up its assault on established leaders such as VMware.
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The software company is now looking to the red-hot virtualization market.
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Refines upgrade path VMware has embraced the world of 64-bit computing via a pair of point releases to its flagship products.â¦
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Turn that SAP upgrade into a virtual headache VMware this week let loose yet another management product, which pushes the virtualization specialist deeper into the data center. Say 'hello' to the beta of VMware Stage Manager.â¦
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VMware Inc. has unveiled the first release candidate of its Fusion virtualization software, with the final version due out next month.