I met with VMWare this week. They own ninety-something percent of the virtualization market. They've now purchased SpringSource. SpringSource is all about simplifying Java development for the enterprise. We use VMWare virtualization heavily and our Java stack is based on SpringSource's.
Is this acquisition a good thing?
It depends. On one hand, it's an interesting opportunity to more seamlessly integrate virtualization into the development desktop. A developer should be able to use whichever desktop they choose and replicate the production environment as much as possible locally. Then a push of a button should send a virtual machine up to the next environment (test, staging, etc.). Extend this ability to sending your virtual machine to be tested or even hosted in the cloud, either intentionally or automatically.
If VMWare wins over the mindshare of the cloud providers then this has beautiful implications for disaster recovery, horizontal scaling, peak offloading and even data center outsourcing itself.
So what could be bad? Two potential problems.
First, VMWare has more developers than Microsoft Windows had at its peak. It's a big company and getting bigger. How able will it be to avoid the bureacracy and bloat mentality that ended up hurting Microsoft and other technology companies who went through this kind of growth?
More importantly, how benevolent will VMWare be? They're basically a monopoly in the virtualization space--at least today until Microsoft catches up. If they end up owning the data centers, internal and external, it's much easier for them to call the shots.
Will we see the same behavior we have seen from Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and others? Will we be held hostage by exorbitant maintenance fees? Will "optional, but really required" add-on prices go through the roof. Will service levels decline in non-contract years?
We shall see. Might be wise to root for Xen or even Microsoft to keep up in this space.
I personally use VirtualBox from Sun - there's an Open Source Edition too. www.virtualbox.org ... if running Ubuntu, just "apt-get install virtualbox-ose"
ReplyDeleteSome good points, Joel. Thanks for the post. Been using ESX for a couple years now (think we have three or four instances of it) and looking forward to trying out CloudFoundry.
ReplyDeleteVMware owns 0% of the AIX virtualization market.
ReplyDeleteWe need to stop thinking of it as a "virtualization" market, rather as a series of markets that serve different OS and server technologies.
JPD: Good point. And, in our experience, AIX is more cost effective per virtual server than VMWare.
Interesting take on virtualization. I'm a developer myself, but the notion of moving virtual machines from Dev to Test to QA to Prod really scares me. I've seen what other developers and I do to virtual machines to get our code to work and it is pretty scary. I'm all for moving installation packages, scripts, etc between environments but I personally don't want my virtual machines ever running a production system.
ReplyDelete[Switching Gears] One interesting feature I've seen with Microsoft Hyper-V in Server 2008 R2 is Core Parking. It essentially shuts down CPU cores when they are being used resulting in potential cost savings for electricity. I'm not sure if the other vendors support it, but it is an interesting feature.
"Will we see the same behavior we have seen from Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and others? Will we be held hostage by exorbitant maintenance fees? Will “optional, but really required” add-on prices go through the roof. Will service levels decline in non-contract years?"
ReplyDeleteAre you seeing any of these same tendencies from cisco or the h/w side? Given the commoditization at the edge and new data center architectures (converged ethernet, etc.), would it make sense for you to personally maintain a relationship with cisco's primary competitors in LAN and SAN networking (HP, Brocade, F5, etc.)? BYU is willing to take on tough competition to see how well they compete (Oklahoma on Saturday); is the church consistently ensuring that cisco does the same?
Last year at Mountain West Ruby Conference, I saw a demo of a Rails app that monitored the load on its asynchronous consumer (measuring queue length) and automatically fired off additional EC2 (Amazon) instances - which also monitored queue length, and shut themselves down when the queue length was consistently low. Very interesting technique - but more interesting to me is how hosting in the cloud creates options for the software designer that have no analog in the physical datacenter. I will be very interested to see how this evolves, especially with an eye toward security.
ReplyDeleteThe acquisition of Spring Source is awesome actually. Spring has been pushing the envelope with OSGi and Dynamic Discovery of services. Virtualization has little to do with developers wanting to use different desktop environments and everything to do with Cloud computing.
ReplyDeleteAIX virtualization is cheaper once you have bit the bullet and invested in the hardware, but overall it isn't near as cheap as a license for VM Ware server and individual OS licenses on intel hardware.