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VMware to Make Server Product Free (as in beer)
yahyamf writes "CNET News.com is reporting that in the face of increasing competition in the OS virtualization market VMWare is going to give away its GSX server product for free, in the hope that customers who try it will eventually migrate to the more powerful ESX server. The company recently released a free VMWare Player which could only run but not create virtual machines. The company faces competition from rival products such as SWsoft's Virtuozzo, Mircrosoft's Virtual Server, as well as open source software like Xen"
I bet this is more because og Mircrosoft than Xen. When Mircrosoft is moving into a field competitors usally shiver....
VMWare's real "killer app" in my opinion is VirtualCenter/VMotion. The management tool is better than anything else I've seen for managing virtual infrastructure - and the ability to move live VMs between hardware nodes is just impressive :)
To play devils advocate here, why isn't VMWare resorting to patents to muscle out the competition? Why compete when a government monopoly can take care of competition for you?
Are all their patents pending?
May the Maths Be with you!
I haven't compared them 1 to 1, but I would expect that GSX has higher requirements for your server, both memory and CPU wise. If that is not the case, you're absolutely right - GSX is all I'm going to need. One more positive side is that open sourcing GSX may trigger few separate public projects based on it (depends on what license GSX sources will be provided under).
Workstation is probably more widely used the GSX server. They are
different Animals. Even tho GSX server may end up being free, we may
install it to a single production server. However, we will also
continue buying Workstation for testing. There are several people with
Workstation installed to the laptops so they can create/run various
VM's. On my laptop alone, I hav about 8 VM's that I use for testing
(various OS, VPN softwares, script design, etc). I would never install
GSX to my laptop.
. . . of much commercial value for long, given that the model of computing is headed for a TCPA/Palladium/Remote attestation/Client assurance/DRM lockdown. Emulating "trusted" computing would defeat the whole purpose of the "content" and computing industries' march towards that model. That, and they'll buy laws making even attempting such emulation punishable by just short of death.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
The hard part of virtualising x86 is having to rewrite guest code on the fly to make sure it doesn't do anything that'd break it out of it's sand box. Vanderpool alleiviates the need to do this.
This changes writing a hypervisor like VMWare from a very, very difficult challenge to just moderately taxing.
This totally changes the landscape - VMWare won't be obsolete, it's just going to have an awful lot more competition in future. The few technical advantages it has over the competition are now handed to everyone on a plate. They've now got to focus on mindshare and administrative ease, since they can no longer rest on their technical laurels.
I'm not so sure that shoehorning an app (and an OS for that matter) that thinks it's running on a signle node into a cluster is such a good idea. The benefits of a cluster are typically only realized when the underlying software has some idea of what's going on and can organize data sufficiently accross the nodes. At best case, I'm guessing there will be an awfully chatty system in place that may get marginally better performance or may even get worse performance than running the app on a single node.
No, vmware lets you assign a MAC address inside the range 00:50:56:XX:YY:ZZ, which is quite reasonable, since this block is assigned to VMWare, and thereby they avoid to conflict with other MAC's on the ether... They also avoid a whole host of problems with people faking mac addresses and such, so I think it's quite reasonable to have this practice...
Why? If you thought $1400 was too much for the product, you wouldn't have bought it. Since you bought the product, clearly you thought that what you were getting was worth more than what you were paying for it. So you were happy with the deal you made with VMware. Surely you are not petty enough to begrudge others the better deal that they are now getting?
Though I'm certainly not the religious sort, I'm reminded of the Christian parable of the workers in the vineyard. You made your own deal with VMware, and you were happy with it. What business is it of yours if, since then, they have changed their plans and now offer better deals to others?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Why do proprietary fanatics think they need to be apologists for commercial software? Because VMWare produces some fantastic products. I couldn't care less if software is commercial or not as long as it fits my needs and my budget. There is simply no open source alternative to VMWare right now that even comes close to what it does at the speeds it does it. Quit being a blind open source fanatic and look around the world sometime. The vast majority of people have no problem paying for software if it fits their needs.
You're a bit misinformed about device virtualization, at least the way VMware does it.
Devices aren't merely multiplexed. They're virtualized (or emulated, if you prefer that term.)
What's the difference? For disks, the virtual machine doesn't see the actual disk controller or disk. It sees an emulated IDE or SCSI controller, and the virtual machine's disk storage is backed by a file in the host operating system. Reads and writes to the disk file go through normal Windows or Linux file APIs on the host. (Raw disk passthrough is possible, but it's still more complicated than multiplexing.)
For network devices, the virtual machine sees an emulated NIC. (AMD PCNet32, Intel E1000, or VMware vmxnet device, depending on the VM.) Packets are sent on the physical network via the Windows or Linux networking layers. To receive incoming packets, the host's network card is put in promiscuous mode, and packets destined for the virtual machine's MAC are filtered to it.
Other types of devices are fully emulated. Video? The VM has a VMware SVGA card. Updates to video are emulated, and the contents of the virtual frame buffer can be displayed via VNC, the VMware remote console, or drawn via X or Windows GDI calls via the local UI. Other types of devices in the virtual machine, like interrupt controllers, the chipset, and so on, are fully implemented in software. No "multiplexing" is done with these devices.
I also disagree that the processor emulation is a "hack" that "kills performance." While x86 is not trap-and-emulate style virtualizable, binary translation is hardly a "hack". And it hardly kills performance. Projects like Dynamo have been improving performance of compiled code by dynamically translating it. And Intel announced plans to kill off x86 emulation in IA-64 hardware, because their software solution was good enough.
You speak truth sir
Fact is, while I'm young (22) compared to probably the majority of the tech industry, I like many others in my generation, grew up on DOS, Windows, OS/2 (yes, we had a old Pentium 100 running dual boot OS/2 Warp and Win 3.1 in our house) and other non open-source software. I didn't know Linux exsisted until sometime around 1999-2000 when my dad started looking into it more for his job. Today I still use Windows because it fits my needs. Sure I could use Linux, and I do for webserver related stuff, but Windows works for me in a workstation enviroment. I have no problem paying for software if it works. I also support OSS that does a better job than commercial alternatives. It's about choice.
Insightful?!? Who is moderating here?
If I think something is worth $1,400, I would still like to pay much less than what it's "worth"... Everybody wants to get a deal, noone wants to waste money. This situation touches on both ends -- I could have saved myself a large amount of money, and I missed out on a great deal.
And, your "Christian parable" is silly. If I negotiate a good compensation package, then find my co-workers doing the same job are getting much higher salaries or stock option packages, it's human nature to be pissed.