Skip to main content

Virtualization Strategy : Go Open Source



Some technologies cannot be held back but some technologies cannot be milked forever. This article (Which I found on Ashish's blog) has the same thing to say. freeing the VMware Server, Comparison models etc is making virtualization a hard place to make money on virtualization itself. As the writer notes there is loads of money to be made when you start cashing on the "relatively new technology" matra to your own good. Microsoft did this to stop VMware's mad rush to the clients. VMware can further push its prices down and use the same "its a great new technology, we got our own staff to assist you set the things up" to their very own favor.

Why the big change in strategy? In one word: Xen. This is an open source virtualization product emanating from Cambridge University, with a commercial arm called Xensource. The entrance of an open source product into the market has caused the effective price of virtualization to head toward zero. What’s interesting about this market, though, is how fast commoditization has occurred. Unlike databases, where Oracle has a huge installed base that it can milk at traditional prices, virtualization is a nascent market where user choices are being made today. VMWare faced its own choice: maintain its historical pricing and end up a bit player, or chop prices, attempt to establish a dominant market share, and figure out how to make money from the resulting user base. VMWare cut its prices with gusto.


But with XenSource releasing its performance paper, it will give uses a very strong reason to try out Xensource as well. So look at Virtualization as a mad train rushing towards the Commoditization land.

Read the article here.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Security: VMware Workstation 6 vulnerability

vulnerable software: VMware Workstation 6.0 for Windows, possible some other VMware products as well type of vulnerability: DoS, potential privilege escalation I found a vulnerability in VMware Workstation 6.0 which allows an unprivileged user in the host OS to crash the system and potentially run arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The issue is in the vmstor-60 driver, which is supposed to mount VMware images within the host OS. When sending the IOCTL code FsSetVoleInformation with subcode FsSetFileInformation with a large buffer and underreporting its size to at max 1024 bytes, it will underrun and potentially execute arbitrary code. Security focus
Post a Comment
Read more

OS Virtualization comparison: Parallels' Virtuozzo vs the rest

Virtuozzo's main differentiators versus hypervisors center on overhead, virtualization flexibility, administration and cost. Virtuozzo requires significantly less overhead than hypervisor solutions, generally in the range of 1% to 5% compared with 7% to 25% for most hypervisors, leaving more of the system available to run user workloads. Customers can also virtualize a wider range of applications using Virtuozzo, including transactional databases, which often suffer from performance problems when used with hypervisors. On the administration side, customers need to manage, maintain and secure just a single OS instance, while the hypervisor model requires customers to manage many OS instances. Of course, the hypervisor vendors have worked hard to automate much of this process, but it still requires more effort to manage and maintain multiple operating systems than a single instance. Finally, OS virtualization with Virtuozzo has a lower list price than the leading hypervisor for comme...
Post a Comment
Read more