Tagged: vmware

Show me the money!


The last few weeks have been very exciting for the virtualization market. Here are some highlights:

First, the [[http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vienna.html|VMware IPO]] created a lot of waves: amidst [[http://www.businessweek.com/investing/insights/blog/archives/2007/04/vmware_ipo_reve.html|skyrocketing stock prices]] and huge oversubscription, this IPO was right up there with the [[http://www.google-ipo.com/|Google IPO]] in the hype meter. It is being called the year’s [[http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/newstex/IBD-0001-19108530.htm|best IPO]] for a good reason — in relative terms, this IPO was indeed huge, closing at 76% higher than the initial prices at the end of the first day.

The repercussions of all this money influx can already be seen. Silicon valley has been haunted the last few years by Google’s hiring spree: for a long time it seemed like the default destination of anyone smart in the bay area looking for a job was Google. They hired good people, and they paid well. It was scaring a lot of the big players in the market. Well, now it seems that VMware has [[http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/328375_vmwaregoogle21.html|joined the club]], with jobs paying [[http://weblog.infoworld.com/virtualization/archives/2007/08/sorry_google_vm.html?source=rss|between 130-160K]]. Phew!

A day after VMware’s IPO, software giant [[http://citrix.com|Citrix]] announced its acquisition of [[http://xensource.com|XenSource]] (see [[http://www.citrix.com/lang/English/lp/lp_680809.asp?ntref=hp_promo1_US|press release]]). Needless to say, the timing of these events was unlikely to be completely co-incidental. Surprisingly, the Xen community has been awfully quiet about the deal — the development mailing lists barely touched upon the subject. I’m not sure if thats good or bad, only time will tell.

Meanwhile, in a series of recent [[http://udrepper.livejournal.com/15795.html|posts]], the GNU libc maintainer, [[http://people.redhat.com/drepper/|Ulrich Drepper]] has [[http://udrepper.livejournal.com/17577.html|criticized the hypervisor approach]] taken by both Xen and VMware, and instead thinks the KVM approach is a much feasible route to efficient virtualization. More on this later.

VMware benchmarks ESX server


and quite expectedly, it outperforms [[http://xensource.com|Xen]]. I just finished reading [[http://www.vmware.com/pdf/virtualization_considerations.pdf|another white paper]] last night which bashes Xen. I have more to say on that white paper, but the short story is that I think the paper is //extremely// biased and tries to convince the reader that VMware’s products are the best, but in the process also spreads a reasonable amount of [[wp>Fud|FUD]].

Anyways, coming back to the aforementioned [[http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/resources/711|benchmark]] — what I find most ironic is that VMware has such strict policies on third parties conducting independent benchmarks, and here they are tooting their own horn. I’m sure ESX performs great, but wouldn’t it be more believable if researchers could independently verify this claim? Until sometime back this was near impossible. Though it seems that recently VMware [[http://weblog.infoworld.com/virtualization/archives/2006/06/vmware_relaxes.html|relaxed]] its licensing restrictions a little bit, so that internal benchmarks can be made public //once the assumptions, methodology and results have been verified/approved by VMware//.

Easy money


I don’t know what the sales of [[http://www.veeam.com/Veeam]] are like, but even after all these years doing software, I still find myself surprised at the kind of things people are ready to pay for. I mean, nothing against Veeam — if they’re making money, good for them!

So take a look at their products: the [[http://www.veeam.com/veeam_scanner.asp|scanner]] and the [[http://www.veeam.com/veeam_monitor.asp|monitor]]. Think about it — exactly what does their software do? It does some monitoring, presumably using VMWare API and/or existing OS tools and/or some inferencing. Its highly unlikely that they actually had to make //any// changes at all to VMWare source code itself. The scanning itself is almost VMWare agnostic. Atleast in the screenshot I can barely see anything which a regular network monitoring tool will not tell you. Even if there are some VMWare specific attributes, I would bet that they simply iterate through all the VMs using some provided API.

Where am I going with this? As far as I can tell, this software is only valuable because of its packaging. The nice GUI etc. For some reason that doesn’t often seem very compelling to me. But I’ve seen numerous examples of this elsewhere as well, where a customers found a product useful not because of revolutionary functionality but because of the packaging and presentation.

But the danger in building a business around these products is that the “big fish” (M$ or even VMWare) could one day decide that this is a cool feature that customers seem to be liking, and just start to bundle it with their products for free. Poof! Just like that, the small fish are endangered. The same thing happened with Google Calendar and Kiko. Or with M$ and thousands of third party software manufacturers back in the day.

//Differentiation// is important, but only when its not easily replicatable.