Vmware boss gets a taste of his own MS medicine
BELEAGUERED virtualisation firm Vmware, surely feeling the heat from 'free as in freedom' virtualisation offerings as well as 'free as in beer' ones, has decided to increase its chances of survival by releasing its Vmware 'thin client' under the Lesser GPL licence.
Vmware recently admitted that it faces increased competition from free products said company CEO, former Microsoftie Paul Maritz. That's an ironic twist of fate, since Martiz became famous for his quote against Netscape when in disclosed internal e-mails as part of the DOJ-vs-Microsoft trial, he said, "We are going to cut off their air supply. Everything they're selling, we're going to give away for free", referring to then-dominant browser maker.
Now he heads a company whose product faces the 'Microsoft treatment' from rivals Sun Microsystems, Red Hat and others.
Vmware's closed-source Vmware Player faces competition from Sun Microsystem's GPL-licensed VirtualBox, among others.
Vmware's open sauce offering is dubbed Vmware View Open Client and is available over here as a 1.5MB+ rpm, with .deb and compressed source code archives as well. This version does not include features like USB redirection, multiple desktop sessions, and multimedia redirection. It lets you connect from Linux desktops to remote Windows machines managed by VMware View.
What really needs an Open Source version, in any case, is Vmware Player, a piece of software which gave this scribbler the fits not too long ago. Hopefully the open sauce version of this thin client will get its bugs fixed faster. [update: installing on Fedora 10 complains about missing "rdesktop" package - D'oh]
Vmware's GPL competitor: Sun's VirtualBox
No wonder Vmware is in trouble. We've been running Sun's Virtualbox for quite some time, and are happy to report it works just fine with the Windows 7 beta - Sun claims it was the first virtualisation product to support Win7 - since its last release it also allows running 64-bit guests under a 32-bit host, if the host processor supports AMD-V.
Let's hope beleaguered Vmware can get its act together and that this move does't prove to be too little, too late. µ
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Whilst VMware player and server are solid, well designed free applications (at least for personal use), VirtualBox is a pile of shit that has inconsistent compatibility across both host and guest operating systems and architectures (32 or 64 bit).
With VMWare server, I can be (reasonably) certain that any crash is due to poor code in the guest OS rather than a fault in the host VM software. With Virtualbox, my experience is the opposite - suspect VB first, check OS second.
Does anyone else think that the future for VMWare now has a finite time limit since Microsoft have released a free alternative in Hyper-V? Regardless of product quality, one-product-companies like VMWare do not tend to have much of a lifespan after MS enters their market. Netscape anyone? How about that company making hard disk compression software? Wordstar? I think the future is more rosy for Citrix, with their XenServer product than for VMWare.
AG
Beleagued? VMware? I think you're talking about a different company, surely? Your article is not a true reflection in my opinion of the success that VMware is still sustaining, just look at their Q4 results. Also, would you please use a spell checker before you post your articles - open sauce? is this a new product from HP?!
Analysis my arse.
I believe the author of the article has little understanding of the current and emerging nature of virtualisation products. The basic virtualisation tool is now reaching the same status as a web browser. No one expects to pay for web browsers, which all offer a minimum set of expected functions. This is the case with all the free tools like VirtualPox, VMware Player, VMware Server, Virtual Iron, Xen opensource and so on.
The basic virtualisation platform is now a commodity. VMware makes its money from enterprise level businesses that need the high revenue addon products to virtualisation that enable High Availability, Dynamic Resource Management, Disaster Recovery and so on.
At the Enterprise level, Citrix/Xen is a promising but distant second to VMware and Microsoft is still laughably missing the plot in virtualisation.
Lets see dome real 'analysis' articles that compare the capabilities of enterprise features like Vmotion, XenMotion and HyperV Quick Motion.
The person who wrote this article has made it painfully obvious they have not done their homework and have no more idea about what's going on in the virtualization market that the average home user. Misspelling "source" is the cherry on top of one of the most poorly researched and written IT articles I have ever had the misfortune to read.