VMWare Eats Microsoft's Lunch

feminazi writes "Jeff Boles attributes VMWare's dominance over Microsoft in the virtualization market to a combination of product depth and focus, but especially to the fact that 'VMWare is actually delivering Microsoft's product in the way that Microsoft should be delivering it.' The ease of GUI but with those enterprise-ready traits that Microsoft is still struggling with: application separation, and decent resource utilization."

Comments

Re:What they're thinking

[Locutus]

naaa, they got VirtualPC because the process and memory virtualization in their operating system is so bad that a crashing application can take out the OS and when THAT happens, it also takes out all the other programs/processes/services running. Enter VirtualPC and now, Microsoft can still sell a bunch of copies of Windows to you but now, you run a copy of Windows in a virtual machine running just one server/service. Duplicate that for failover and repeat the process for all the other server/services you want to provide your customers/users.

Now, Windows competes with UNIX and Linux in that one boxen can run many server/services and have good uptime. You'll have to throw about 4x the hardware resources at the Microsoft solution because of the overhead Windows puts in each VM but Dell, HP, etc like selling bigger servers and Microsoft likes selling all those product licenses for the redundent VMs and licenses for Windows in ever VM.

One of the few times Microsoft actually NEEDS what they're purchasing.

LoB