The vast majority of why people are VMware proponents is down to their virtualisation software. It's why we were big resellers for a while. But for the last few years, their own sales people have only wanted to talk about security products, quite plainly acknowledging stagnant growth in on premise virtualisation.
But virtualisation is in my view the only place they've made it big. You've just linked a Reddit post in /r/cybersecurity talking about security products and every reply is about how to replace ESXi. It'll be interesting to see how their future pans out.
VMware Workstation blew my mind when I saw it demoed in (I think) mid-2000 [1]. I genuinely couldn't believe what I was seeing - it seemed that revolutionary, running an OS inside an OS on a desktop. I wonder whether VMware's problem nowadays is that, having basically invented the technology, they've become almost synonymous with the category of virtualisation tech - kind of like "Hoover" for home appliances - and their other products get less attention.
(I know that VMware didn't invent the idea of virtual machines. But my perception is that at that time, virtualised OSs were mostly found in mainframes.)
When people think of virtualisation, they think VMware as a key player in building and pushing the technology.
Like when you think of the first smartphone you think of the Apple iPhone, despite there being "smartphones" prior to its release.
IBM, actually, on mainframes.
Yes, I noted that in my post. I guess I meant general purpose virtualisation running on general purpose, commodity hardware.
Back in the late 80s spent 18 months in a role where I was developing scientific software on an IBM System/36 under VM/CMS. While this system actually had a hypervisor (CP) running on the physical hardware, and itself running virtualised instances of the CMS OS, it never felt (in hindsight) like I was in a virtualised environment. It seemed more like being logged into a multi-user unix box where everything ran in the same kernel - perhaps because the mainframe virtualisation layer was completely invisible to me, and everyone on the mainframe saw the same OS.
But point taken.
That's called emulation. That's not what VMWare does.
> I genuinely couldn't believe what I was seeing - it seemed that revolutionary, running an OS inside an OS on a desktop
SoftPC was in fact “running an OS inside an OS on the desktop “
I imagine someone could use docker instead of VMware in most cases, and if that's not possible then hire some people to make it so.
Vendor lockin is a scary thing, the people who are really going to hurt here are mega super corps who are now going to have to pay out the nose. If you're a smaller company, you should be moving to docker or another open source solution anyway.
I would argue that there are more Docker containers running on a VM, running on top of VMware than there are Docker containers running on bare metal servers.
Both VMs and containers can be used and misused in a number of ways, but rarely can you replace a VM on VMware ESXi with Docker. There's still a massive business case for VMware and the only real competitors are Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer (if it's still called that).
You also have to remember that there's a crazy big Microsoft world out there, Docker and containers still aren't of much use here. While this could run on Hyper-V, many just pick ESXi because it's what they know (No one was ever fired for choosing VMware).
Ether figure it out now, or in 2 years when VMware starts to suck.
Then again, all the big companies I know put things off until the last moment.
If I was a better developer I'd be putting together a project right now that allows you to run all your happy legacy Windows software with Docker.
Shouldn't be hard to raise a bit of funding for such a project assuming you have the right background.
... on Windows. So it doesn't really mesh with a typical server environment.
Or use Virtual Box on Ubuntu
But, this does offer incentive for outsiders to create competitive stacks.
If you are rolling your own replacement of VMware, what happens if a couple (or even say 20 out of your 5000) of your “parent” hosts go down. Will all of your guests auto-migrate to healthy hosts?
And we are not talking about Kubernetes or similar here. That is very different. You don’t roll your own VMware alternative. You just use VMware.
When you refer to smaller company and mention docker, or open source, it's only those that are tech startups, or close to the field with the skill to operate in this fashion. The majority of small and medium companies don't have the skills or resources to do this. Over time that changes, but it's completely unrealistic to think that they can get away quickly from VMware (even when their overworked IT person would like to.)
You can run Windows in a docker container so this would support legacy applications.
I'm not saying it's easy, but it's not insurmountable. If all else fails, Virtual box is open source
It's been a few years since I've worked with bare metal, but doesn't Docker require a hypervisor for the containers?
You could swap to KVM or Hyper-V, but transitioning an org's hypervisor on bare metal is a massive task any way you cut it.
I was on a team that ran performance critical stuff for a reasonable sized ecommerce business - moving from vmware to bare metal was fantastic on every level from api’s to performance and reliability.
The enterprise spirit is stong in vmware.
> My hope is that Michael Dell vetos this merger, from my accounts of Michael and the people I know who are employed by Dell, Michael is a great leader and a good human being and that is the most important thing, not profit at any cost.
I don't know if the author is serious. This deal has Michael Dell financial engineering written all over it. He's not going to veto anything. Dell is all about enriching himself with moves like this rather organically grow a company.
> Seems like their software strategy is to buy a business which doesn't have much room to grow but is extremely entrenched, and then reduce staffing and raise prices as much as possible.