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IT Blogwatch

A Daily Digest of IT Blogs from Richi Jennings

VMware's VMworld is virtually cloudy

TAGS:EMC, vCenter, VDC-OS, VMware, VMworld 2008
IT TOPICS:Desktop Applications, Enterprise Software & Services, Operating Systems, Servers & Data Center, Storage

VMware logo In Monday's IT Blogwatch, we watch as VMware kicks off its user conference, while drooling competitors circle hungrily. Not to mention Trent Reznor, the Mac fanboi...

Patrick Thibodeau reports:

VMware Inc. expects 14,000 attendees at its annual user conference in Las Vegas this week, including workers from more than 200 trade-show exhibitors. That's a 30% increase over last year's attendance — clear evidence of VMware's influence. But VMworld 2008 will also be the focal point for the gathering storm of competition that the virtualization market leader faces.

Among the companies fighting for users at the conference will be the first serious challengers to VMware's dominance of server virtualization. That includes Microsoft Corp., which released its Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor in June, and Citrix Systems Inc., which today plans to announce a new version of the XenServer software that it acquired last year.

VMware has let competitors set up booths at its shows since the first VMworld in 2004, but it still controls the conference agenda.

Om Malik adds:

Going into the show, the company that prompted many copycats and even more innovators to try their hand at virtualization faces a plethora of challenges, among them the threat of commoditization of its core product, increased competition and fiscal uncertainty. But the most important question is also the hardest one to answer: Did EMC’s meddling kill the golden goose known as VMware?
...
Earlier this year a tempered forecast for revenue and profit growth sent VMware’s stock reeling ... and led to the firing of co-founder and CEO Diane Greene. She was replaced by Paul Maritz, a former Microsoft executive ... followed by the departure of Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, VMware’s chief scientist and co-founder ... The exodus of these and other senior members of VMware’s management team is making folks on Wall Street nervous.
...
I think the biggest threat to VMware market is Microsoft, which despite being a latecomer is pretty serious about this market ... And as if that weren’t enough, VMware’s hypervisor technology is facing an open source threat.

Scott Lowe is "kind of excited" about VMware's new Virtual Datacenter OS:

When you think of an OS, you think of software that manages access to resources and provides services to applications. That’s what VMware is doing with VDC-OS: managing access to resources and providing services to applications, only this time the applications are workloads (virtual machines with an OS and a set of applications on that guest OS).
...
What VMware is working on is an OS for the virtual datacenter, not a virtual OS for the datacenter. The distinction is important. VDC-OS isn’t intended to be an OS for all aspects of the datacenter. It’s intended to be an OS for all aspects of the virtual datacenter ... Look at VDC-OS as a framework. Within this framework are sets of services that can be extended or modified in very standardized ways (via APIs and SDKs) to provide different functionality for the applications running within that framework.
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It is the next step in the evolution and maturation of virtualization.

Toon Vanagt explains:

It is VMware’s aspiration to offer every business the flexible infrastructure associated with Amazon, Google and Salesforce ... VMware’s new CEO Paul Maritz (who was an early believer in cloud computing) will use this ... announcement (not a product release) to warm up the 14,000 people expected at its annual conference in Las Vegas this week.
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[They] will be happy to learn they are not going to be out of their jobs soon. Especially with cloud providers threatening to reduce corporate IT departments, completely virtualized datacenters are believed to be the future. VMware intends to keep those datacenters under their corporate client’s control on standardized X86 hardware.

Duncan Epping gulps down the Kool-Aid, straw and all:

A Virtual Datacenter Operating System is characterized by hardware and location independent applications, service level contracts between the infrastructure and applications and a shared, dynamic infrastructure.
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No more maintaining and configuring several VC’s, just link ‘em up! ... This is the future, real plug and play ... High i/o servers? No problem ... No more need for any other way of clustering, zero data loss, no more down time!
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What more can I say than “WOW”! ... There’s no need to spend a lot of time on configuring. Figure it out once, and just apply it to the rest of the hosts! With hot add CPU, MEM, Networkand with VMotion and Fault Tolerance there’s no need for down time any more. And I’m not even talking about doing backups and restores from within your vCenter and all the cool new storage related features.

And finally...

Nine Inch Nails say 'Get A Mac' (kinda)

Buffer overflow:

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 22 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him on Twitter, pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.

Previously in IT Blogwatch: