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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"
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!
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.