VMware Opens Up API to Partners

mstansberry writes "This week VMware opens up its source code to its x86 partners, calling it the best mix of open-source and proprietary. While the general public won't get a look at the source code, the likes of IBM, HP, Red Hat and others will. Releasing an API is a way for a company to bring more people into the fold and to get more applications integrated within the platform. But from the looks of last quarter's financial reports, VMware doesn't need much help getting people on board."

Comments

I wonder if Apple...

[daveschroeder]

...will jump on the vmware bandwagon. With Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server (especially Mac OS X Server in the context of what I'm about to discuss) supporting x86, it would be trivially easy to have Mac OS X Server run in a supported fashion in a vmware environment on any variety of hardware. Stay with me for a moment: similar to the impact of soon being able to get an Apple desktop or, especially, laptop system that runs Mac OS X plus any x86 OS, including Windows, in a sure-to-exist virtual machine/vmware-like environment at near-native speed of the underlying hardware, having Mac OS X Server run on vmware in a server environment - somewhat the reverse - would be a huge coup for Apple in the datacenter.

Yes, yes, we all know that Apple, at least at the outset, will not "allow" Mac OS X to run on non-Apple hardware. Aside from some semi-insane but actually interesting prognostications from John Dvorak (and TPM panic aside), Apple is primarily talking about the desktop/consumer marketplace when it says this. There is little to nothing to stop Apple from partnering with an enterprise x86 vendor (or a partner such as vmware) to provide a vehicle via which to run Mac OS X Server on hardware other than Apple's 1U, single-power-supply Xserve.

Mac OS X will only run exclusively on Apple hardware as long as its good for Apple. As soon as it becomes desirable to allow Mac OS X (or Mac OS X Server) to run on possible non-Apple hardware configurations, you had better believe they'll do it. That's probably part-and-parcel to this whole x86 transition strategy. Further, consider that individual market segments may be appropriate for this first, such as enterprise datacenter and server markets. Consider also that while Mac OS X is $129 ($69 government and education), Mac OS X Server is $499/$999 ($249/$499 government and education), meaning that Mac OS X Server has a price point much more in line with allowing Mac OS X Server to run sans Apple hardware and still be a profit center. And as it matures, Mac OS X Server is an increasingly powerful, very attractive UNIX server platform, with major commercial vendor support and the best of the open source world wrapped up into one product.

I see Mac OS X Server on (something like) vmware on non-Apple x86 enterprise server hardware in Apple's future.

Re:I wonder if Apple...

[Jeff Hornby]

Three reasons this won't fly:

The first, as you mentioned is mindshare. No matter how hard Apple tries, their office suite will never be more than marginally noticed by mainstream IT managers.

The second, and more important, is that writing a full office suite is not a trivial undertaking. The combined person-years that have gone into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook and anything else included in Office would be far beyond the means of Apple to duplicate. And even if they did have that kind of money (and with recent iPod sales, maybe they do), it would still not be as cost effective as the status quo.

The third reason, realted to the second, is that development of an office suite would take a very long time. Would you buy an Apple if some absolutely necessary piece of software like a word processor wouldn't be available for two to three years? Meaning that every desktop in your company would need to have two computers, one for whatever they could do on the Apple and one for everything else.

Apple's best hope if Microsoft were to pull support for Office for the Mac (which I doubt they would do) would be to work on OpenOffice until it works with Microsoft's new formats and works very well on the Mac. Only then would they MAYBE have a chance.

Nice.

[alaeth]

VMware is probably one of the most useful QA products out there. Nice to see them open it up for 3rd party vendors to play with. Anyone else use VMware 5? Gotta love the new snapshotting features.

Doublespeak

[Anonymous Coward]

So by "best mix of open-source and proprietary", they mean "not open-source at all".

Not very exciting

[Bruce Perens]

VMWare is opening its API up to partners? It's a typical NDA agreement between companies. Not very exciting and not worthy of a press release - except for the fact that they don't have another way to generate buzz around Linuxworld. Meanwhile Xen is gaining ground, is a technically better approach, and is real Open Source. VMWare? Yawn.

Bruce

Re:Not very exciting

[Anonymous Coward]

Xen may be technically better, but that doesn't help a shop needing Windows XP running on it. Not supporing an OS on a sizable chunk of computers out there to me is more then a "minor detail"

Re:Not very exciting

[kma]

Yes, the other virtual machine programs spoof the hosted OS by emulating the interrupt controller and some other hardware. This code for the most part already exists in other Open Source projects, and if someone wants it enough, it could be added to Xen.

Reality check, Bruce. You have absolutlely no idea what you're talking about here, ok? If it were all this easy, somebody would have gotten around to it by now. Go ask the Xen guys what's involved in running unmodified OS'es, and they'll tell you that porting PIC emulation code from Bochs is a pimple on the ass of this bull of a problem.

Too little too late

[Mensa Babe]

It's great news. The only problem is that today with enterprise-ready UML, Xen et al. we serious computer scientists no longer need VMware being any more open to begin with. You missed the first train so don't beat the dead horse now.

Re:VMWare is owned by EMC

[superpulpsicle]

I never understood this acquisition by EMC. The whole virtualization thing in SAN is far from the OS level. You want to see virtualization in storage, look at HDS tagmastore. This vmware thing was the biggest publicity stun, they are just trying to bounce back from the 90s dominance which they are clearly loosing grip on.

The OS emulation part of vmware workstation really has nothing to do with storage. All the other products are overkill. Which is what EMC does best, sell you way more software than you need. In the end people end up with HDS, HP.

They're thinking more long-term, which is smart

[jerkychew]

"But from the looks of last quarter's financial reports, VMware doesn't need much help getting people on board."

It's got nothing to do with revenue, it's about market share. Virtual machines are going to be huge in the coming years, especially in the webhosting market. Pretty soon, leasing a "dedicated server" will be simply leasing a dedicated "instance" of a server, for lack of a better word.

EMC wants to keep their lion's share of the market, especially with products like MS' Virtual Server 2005 and SWSoft's Virtuozzo entering the fray.

I did some contracting work for Big Blue a few months ago, and their deployment teams LOVE VMWare. They used it for all kinds of crazy stuff, and it worked amazingly well. I hadn't used VMWare since a very early beta back in the 90's, and was impressed at how well it has come along since then.

EMC is just protecting its market share now as best it can, before others start chipping into it.

Less real significance over time...

[Douglas Simmons]

With the open source term becoming the latest wall street Good Thing buzzword, the risk-reward ratio of releasing source code, more often than not in a very limited way, is an attempt on behalf of these companies to declare to public investors that the integrity of their product is strong enough to the degree that they have no compunction of releasing their secret blueprints, essentially inviting people to come hack pbrush.exe and VMware. To hackers, most of this OS releasing going on is of software that has no hacking appeal. There's just no motive to capitalizing on these OS releases.

I, for one, am not impressed by what strike me as PR maneuvers which at best are patinas devoid of true significance worthy of a meaningful press release. Otoh, I suppose it may increase shareholder wealth, the legal purpose of a public company.

Separation isn't comparable

[DreadSpoon]

Separation is great if all you're looking to do is separate privileges. That's not what Xen or VMware are really about, though. Virtualization gives you features that Separation does not.

A big one is being able to run two completely different OSes on a single machine at the same time.

Another is that you can kernel development a lot easier using virtualization than if you had to develop *on* your development kernel and constantly reboot/crash/fix/etc. This also holds true for security when using virtualization as a form of privilege separation, as kernels can have security holes and bugs, too.

A third is the ability to take snapshots of a running system and saving, transferring, and restoring that state.

Sure, virtualization is a _little_ slower than separation, but that's the price you have to pay if you want those features.

Emulation also brings some other advantages in addition to virtualization, at the cost of even worse performance. Once again, you can't just say that virtualization or separation are better than emulation, because that isn't really true in all cases; if you have a need to run some binaries made for one architecture on another, only emulation is going to help you.

Re:VMware

[Anonymous Coward]

Because if I want to run 12 vm's to test my software on different linus distros I can.

VMWare is the best qc and dev environment, because I am no longer limited to the number of physical boxes I own.