VMWare Eats Microsoft's Lunch

feminazi writes "Jeff Boles attributes VMWare's dominance over Microsoft in the virtualization market to a combination of product depth and focus, but especially to the fact that 'VMWare is actually delivering Microsoft's product in the way that Microsoft should be delivering it.' The ease of GUI but with those enterprise-ready traits that Microsoft is still struggling with: application separation, and decent resource utilization."

Not originally an MS product?

[Anonymous Coward]

For what it's worth Microsoft Virtual Server was originally developed by Connectix, not MS. Microsoft bought it.

Re:Solaris Support?

[dtbw]

ESX Version 3 support Solaris 10

Re:This isn't really news...

[PriusFan]

Disclaimer: I am a VMware employee. And I work in marketing. Please don't hurt me. Just wanted to mention that VMware Server is also free... and just as good as (better than?) MicroSoft Virtual Server.

Re:Solaris Support?

[0racle]

He said host, not guest. You don't need a host OS with ESX, it is the host. Solaris x86 is supported as a guest in most (all?) VMware products.

Re: VMWare Eats Microsoft's Lunch

[Daedone]

And Gmail is still invite-only.

Not completely.

https://www.google.com/accounts/SmsMailSignup1 [google.com]

Re:This isn't really news...

[poulbailey]

You probably should've checked the actual terms before posting this FUD, you know.

From http://www.vmware.com/products/server/faqs.html [vmware.com]:

Q: Will VMware Server still be free when it is generally available?
A: Yes, VMware Server will be a free product. There will not be any charge for licenses to VMware Server when it becomes generally available.

Re:VMware for personal use

[Wordplay]

ObDisc: I work for VMware, but I don't speak for them in any way, shape, or form. This is a highly unofficial reply.

1) Couldn't get an answer for any .deb plans, but the Player is packaged for Debian (Multiverse).

2) No plans that I know of. I believe the Apple EULA for OS X requires it to be installed on Mac hardware.

3) That would be the purpose of VMware Player. You might also check out VMware Server, which is more versatile.

4) The latter, Windows hosted on Linux.

Re:Microsoft Style

[enosys]

Can't you disable those checks somewhere, like maybe Edit -> Preferences -> Workspace -> Software updates?

Re:Not originally an MS product?

[hawaiian717]

With Apple going to Intel I'm frankly waiting (with baited breath) for VMWare to come out with a version for OS X [Intel]

Have you looked at Parallels Desktop [parallels.com]? It much like VMWare Workstation, but cheaper.

Re:People do not seem to understand...

[InsaneGeek]

Actually what you don't seem to understand is support leggacy proucts and consolidation that's been one of the big selling point for VMware for longer than MS has had their product out. They even have been selling a product specifically for that process to make it dead simple (P2V) where you pop in a cd and it will take an old box and pull it into vmware. MS deffinetly doesn't win this market, they are later to this market than VMware is, their product is worse than VMware and VMware goes beyond just supporting legacy/consolidation to test, dev, DR, etc. and VMware still smokes MS virtual server on performance on *ALL* items (network, cpu, memory and disk).

Re:VMware for personal use

[univgeek]

For making sure the vmware .tgz doesn't screw with the package management use checkinstall - at the very least you'll have the record of what files are installed and you can do a clean uninstall.

sudo apt-get install checkinstall

cd vmware
checkinstall install

Re: VMWare Eats Microsoft's Lunch

[advocate_one]

unfortunately they don't allow this method from the UK...

Re:No details.

[steve_l]

good point

1. VMWare runs on non windows x86 platforms (Unix, linux, soon macos).

2. They have *excellent* support, even for vmware client. That is a rarity today. But if you have some problem with the virtual VGA driver on Vista when hosting on Suse/Redhat, you can file tickets with them and get someone to actually help you -even to phone up to check up on how well it worked.

3. It's pretty fast, even on x86 kit without the new opcodes

4. VMWare images are freely redistributable, they dont even ask for reactivation when you move XP or Vista images around.

5. Its a realistic enough OS emulation you can develop and debug kernel-mode code on it.

#5 matters. We've done stuff that needed drivers in the IDE chain to emulate enhanced DVD drives that werent ready. Virtual PC would just bail out, its their virtual IDE drive and you mustnt fiddle with. VMWare happily runs the stuff.

I got into using VMWare just to run windows apps on Unix. Its not as elegant a solution as Wine -you need two operating systems to keep up to date, a virtual XP image is just as insecure as a real one. But it runs nearly everything, even those legacy apps that I need to use to do corporate things like travel expense.

What we've got into more recently is vmware for simulating and testing complex networks/systems. As an example, say your web server needs a database behind it, and it takes ages to populate it with 5million records for testing. Create the database on a virtual linux image, fully configured, then save that image as a snapshot. whenever you need the database up for testing, bring up the image, then revert to the snapshot afterwards. Its lovely.

-steve

Re: VMWare Eats Microsoft's Lunch

[cp.tar]

Yes, that's nice. However, there is a whole world outside the borders of the few countries that are supported.
And I'm in it.