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EMC To Acquire VMware
kma writes "According to The Register, virtual machine software maker (and my employer) VMware Inc. will be acquired by storage giant EMC, pending the usual approval process." The article explains: "VMware makes the industry's premier set of partitioning tools for running both Windows and Linux on a single server and running multiple applications on a single system. EMC plans to grab the privately held VMware for $635 million in cash."
You're confusing emulation with virtualization. Storage virtualization is a really big deal these days. Check out the book "Virtual Storage Redefined: Technologies and applications for storage virtualization" by Paul Massiglia (of Veritas).
Isolation, and performance guarintees on shared systems are often more important than raw performance in something like a datacenter environment.
Adam
Would you do it for some scoobie crack?
All of these moves just demonstrate the increasing move back to the mainframe. Now, the mainframe presents a virtual GUI interface to the user vs. a 80x25 green screen. The mainframe now becomes a series of operating system images, working in a virtualized system, providing users with their environment to do their work. Really, look at the "on demand" efforts by IBM and others, or the moves by Microsoft with VirtualPC and continued strength of Terminal Server. And you'll have access all the way down to your PDA/Phone! And once they lick persistent sessions across your instance, well then, you'll never have to reboot again!
The cycle continues yet again. What will create the next requirement to move systems off of the mainframe? I'm not quite sure, but let's hope that VMware (really ESX Server and GX Server--the real reason they bought VMware) does not get too tied to EMC storage virtualization. There are too many good uses beyond creating reasons to buy hard drives or SANs.
...tizzyd
VMware had filed its intention to go public in July of this year, and every indication was that process was proceeding normally. Analysts expected them to make their public markets debut soon. I suppose EMC, which has been on a buying spree with billion-dollar buyouts of both content management technology provider Documentum and storage management provider Legato Systems earlier this year, made an offer VMware just could not refuse. It had to be good, because they were expected to make several hundred million from an IPO. :)
Cheers,
Doug
Doug Mehus http://doug.mehus.info/
Virtual PC can run most x86 operating systems
a lu ation/overview2004.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/virtualpc/ev
They're not going to support it, it doesn't mean that Virtual PC 2004 won't run Linux as a guest OS. In fact, I know people that are doing so right now.
Don't confuse vendor support for an option with product support for that option. They are two entirely different types of "support".
Let's see...
EMC's acquisition of Data General has been quite successful. (EMC cut out the server business that was losing money and made Clariion more profitable and improved its market share.)
EMC's acquisition of McData was reasonably successful, though it was later spun off as a separate company again. (I suspect it was sold for more than it was purchased, but I haven't checked.)
I think you hear a lot more about the ones that don't work out.
VMware is not emulation it is virtualization.
Its not really an instruction translator, really more of a fancy instruction scheduler.
It allows supreme flexibility. If you currently have an assortment of servers doing different tasks (and with Windows 2000 Server, you eventually learn it's better to spread out the service responsibilities), sometimes it's difficult to plan 3-4 years in advance for your resource use.
With VMWare, you can run several virtual servers on a big (quad cpu) server, attach essentially unlimited amounts of fast disk, and shuffle resource allocation around as you see fit.
If absolute uptime is required, you have two such server in different locations, one of which is failover.
If you can afford 2-8 hours of downtime, you just make sure the one server has as much redundancy as possible, and then you plan to call Dell/HP/IBM if the mobo or raid controller card fails.
It's an old idea made new, but it's a good idea.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
One Word: Bollocks
1) VMware is a virtualization program
2) Bochs is an emulator
The difference is that Bochs interprets foreign machine code, while VMware lets code run natively, with "traps" to catch it when it tries to do things with the virtual hardware. As a result, Bochs is slow but can run x86 code on any architecture (a PowerPC box) for example, while VMware is fast but only runs on x86.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Yes, but you would need to develop a new server configuration. VMWare allows you to consolidate existing servers onto newer, faster hardware without changing any of the config details.
When you are dealing 100s of servers that need to be up all the time, this is a big plus.
Also, wouldn't a "set of partitioning tools" be something like Partition Magic or fdisk? Or are we using a more generic form of the word partition?
The latter.
You can "partition" anything computerish into several, virtual, smaller units.
This sort of stuff is much more common in mainframe shops. You might have a single machine with a bunch of processors, I/O channel processors, device controllers, and devices. You partition it into several smaller virtual mainframe machines, each called "partitions" and each composed of some subset of these resources.
For instance: You might have a machine with 16 processors, of which you licensed 12 (the rest are in-place spares). You throw 4 of them into each of two multi-CPU partitions, one for accounting and one for engineering, use 10% of the time of another in each of ten "slow" partitions for OS software development, linux systems running web servers, and so on. (Maybe the last three get switched between accounting near payroll time and engineering near product release time.) You allocate disks, tapes, memory devices, controllers, etc. (or slices of them), to each partition.
Of those 4 CPUs that are unlicensed spares, maybe one is fried and the other three are in the mainframe supplier's "diagnostic partition", constantly (or intermittently) running hardware diagnostics on themselves and any devices that the vendor's maintainence people are fixing, have fixed but haven't released back to the customer, are installing for "delivery" next month, or are on-site spares of something other than CPUs that haven't yet been bought/rented by the shop.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That's funny, I've had entirely the oposite experience...running XP in VMWare on Linux had minimum effect on the Linux host, and Windows ran acceptably well. I could even run an XP instance with 256Mb of memory and a 2000 instance with 128 meg along side, leaving the last 128 meg for the host, without much pain.
Running Linux in VMWare with an XP host however is just not the same experience - Windows starts swapping constantly and switching applications gets painful. (this is with 512Mb physical memory, 128 assigned to the Linux guest).
Advanced users are users too!
Or are we using a more generic form of the word partition?
In the world of mainframes, a partition is a common name for a virtual machine...
I have Win4Lin also.
Win4Lin requires a patch to the Linux kernel. They just announced support for Linux kernel 2.6; it's a free upgrade for Win4Lin users.
On the whole, I'm pleased with Netraverse as a company. They have been good about upgrade pricing, and they don't require "activation" for Win4Lin. (Just a long annoying license code. I can live with that.)
Win4Lin runs Windows 98 or ME, but not Windows NT, 2000, or XP. (Yet, anyway.) Win4Lin doesn't handle USB devices or a 3D accelerator card. But networking support is complete, including the MS-specific protocols.
If you have a few Windows applications you want to run on a Linux desktop, Win4Lin is a good choice.
P.S. I cannot get Windows Update to run correctly on my Win4Lin desktop. (It doesn't really matter, since Win98 isn't supported anymore. But if you run Win4Lin and Windows Update works for you, please let me know.)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
People should always have been looking at Bochs because Bochs is GPL and VMware is not. Freedom is important. Don't forget that.
However there are criticisms against Bochs as a practical replacement for VMWare.
Of course, a point in Bochs favour is that it runs on any host architecture. You can run VMWare on x86 and... well that's it. Bochs runs on Sparc and PowerPC and dozens of others in addition to x86. This is because VMWare is virtualisation but Bochs is emulation.
Another point in Bochs favour is the ongoing effort to implement Dynamic Translation (DT). No fruit yet but projects like QEMU prove that the skilled developers are out there and are willing to write free DT software. DT is a non-virtualisation technique which should offer a 10-20x performance improvement on all host architectures. Unfortunately DT needs to be reimplemented for each host architecture but that might be acceptable. DT is what makes Virtual PC run Windows at an acceptable speed on the PowerPC architecture.
Yet another point in Bochs favour is Kevin's current work on Plex86 virtualisation. Yes, this currently only works for "modified" guest OS like the modified-Linux he demonstrated earlier this year. However Bochs now has Plex86 support; it can optionally (command-line option) pass code pages to Plex86 for virtualised execution. If Plex86 fails then Bochs retries the code page with its slower emulation code. So there is some promise that Bochs will soon get full virtualisation on the x86 host architecture.
Linux has never been a host OS for Virtual PC. It wasn't before Microsoft got involved. Did you expect it to be after?
In order to develop three tier client server apps without having three or more computers.
In order to experiment with DMZ settings for a web front end and an SQL server back end.
In order to test your Win98 client, your Win2000 client, and your Linux client against your server while you are in coach flying cross country (laptop with LOTS of memory.)
In order to download and run the most spyware / virus laden crap on the planet without worrying about it hosing your primary machine.
In order to host 6 different instances of application servers without worrying about any of them crashing and killing the other five. On one machine.
In order to apply the power of an IBM x440 16CPU server with 32G of memory, because you only get to buy one this year.
In order to establish a test environment that replicates the real environment (including data) without endangering the live data.
To experiment with Linux 9.0 and see if anything new gets broken that works under Linux 8.0 - without bringing down your 8.0 server.
To create a new platform to deploy your new application to in about 4 minutes (copy the files that constitute your baseline (clean) install) from one directory to another, start the new one and change the machine name.)
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Neither of them requires binary-only kernel modules; vmware requires kernel modules for which it provides the source, and win4lin requires applying a patch to the kernel source. They are both fairly innocuous.
Larry
"Cash" in this circumstance means "cash or cash equivalents." In business use, cash means "neither stock nor bonds." In practice, think of the payer selling marketable securities, followed by a very fat bank transfer, followed by the payee(s) buying up marketable securities (although these days, with rates as low as they are, these transactions are a tad less urgent.)
Salemen that will wine, dine & fellate to get a contract, then nonexistent support on equipment that's 2 generations behind at 2 x the price of their competition. Where I used to work we had EMC SAN that never even had the phone lines attached that EMC was to use to dial in & monitor, and after asking about an upgrade for a unit they had to come and physically look inside the cabinet because they didn't even know what the **** they sold us. They got our pinhead CFO to sign an ironclad 5 year contract we couldn't get out of. Yay, EMC!
Well, depending on what you need VMWare for, just consider Win4Lin [win4lin.com].
You're forgetting that VMWare has more than just one product. It's obvious from the article that VMWare Workstation is not the product they were after.
This deal is all about getting their hands on the ESX and GSX server products.
That said, ALL of VMWare's products are much more flexible than Win4Lin, which is really just a niche product, even moreso than VirtualPC. Those two are designed for people who just need to run the occasional Windows app on a foreign OS.
The real beauty of VMWare's products, even the Workstation version to a small extent, is that you can actually run production servers within the VM's. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it with Workstation, but I have gotten away with it for brief periods in the past.
Now, with GSX server, you CAN run production servers inside a VM with confidence. And with the VMWare Remote Console, you can access those individual servers from across the network as if you were in front of them physically. Mail server is running out of memory, but the file server has way more than it needs? No problem, just access a web interface and move some memory from one to the other. Beats the hell out of swapping DIMMs around.
Plus you can allocate resources at a much finer resolution than with physical hardware.
Not to mention that my server room now only needs two boxes, and two UPSs, instead of dozens.
Personally, I wouldn't even place Win4Lin in the same product category as VMWare's offerings. And they DEFINITELY have different target markets and intended uses.
Speaking as a VMware employee (not speaking for the company, yada, etc.), I'm feeling rather more "stoked" than "burned in the ass." In fact, I'm turning freaking cartwheels in the streets over this deal. The whole idea with pre-IPO companies is that you take the risk of working somewhere unstable in exchange for a larger than average stake in the company. Remember that whole "getting paid in options" thing? That's still how startups work.
So, it's not just three people walking away with 9 digit checks, as you are imagining. It's hundreds of employees whose stakes are now worth 6 digits. The terms of our purchase are quite likely better for me than an IPO would have been. From the inside, it looks as though the board actually gave a lot of thought to how this would impact employees.
I'm a VMware employee (and anonymous for the same reason).
This deal makes a lot of sense for me. SANs are great for virtualizing storage. I can add storage to servers entirely with software, and all storage management is centralized.
VMware is doing the same thing with servers themselves with ESX server and Virtual Center. "VMotion" (possibly the worst name in computer industry history) lets you move a running VM from server to server with 0 down-time. This is only performant because the virtual disk is stored on a SAN.
If only we could get away without having to have a Linux and Windows machine on every desk at VMware. Unfortunately, VMware doesn't run in a VM, and probably won't for reasons having to do with shockingly esoteric details of the ia32 architecture.
You can also set VMWare to use physical drive instead of virtual.
Your point are, generally, correct. Even though Win4Lin biased :)
If you were like me (or in my shoes, rather) your preference might be different -- I need to be able to run an alternative OS within a W2K environment -- to carry around things that don't run native (or don't run well native) in W2K.
Please do not Cygwin me -- Cygwin still has a long way to go to really be there. (As a pet PV -- let me know once you're able to compile stock Tcl/Tk under Cygwin and also AOLServer).
--AP
It works in the lab right now. It'll become a product soon.
And it's good to see that at least a handful of slashdotters here understand what this deal means. Most people are blathering on about EMC buying VMware at Microsoft's behest to kill off VMware Workstation!
One minor correction, as of right now, VMotion is an ESX only toy.
This isn't a merger, it's an acquisition.
http://www.vmware.com/news/releases/emc.html
VMware will still be run by Diane Green. EMC folks aren't going to be coming in to run the show. They don't want to disturb the team that's been assembled. Doing so would only be to the detriment of all parties involved. VMware will be able to leverage EMC's sales and marketing folks for more placement which will allow them to grow faster than they would have otherwise had they gone on the IPO themselves. More money will be able to be placed on R&D for better products.
I can only imagine that it will (in the end) add to EMC's bottom line, and help VMware to get better products to market faster with added resources.
Don't go firing the FUD guns until you have a real target to shoot at.
To Alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.