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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."
VMWare is easier to use.
Windows does not require reactivation when the image is opened in VMWare Server, Player, or Workstation. VPC images of demo configurations featuring pre-activated Windows that I get from Microsoft and attempt to run under Virtual Server require reactivation.
VMWare Workstation has too many useful features.
Therefore, I create my own demo environments in VMWare Server as my first choice and run VPC images in Virtual PC 2004 by necessity. Guess which environment is significantly faster? I have no incentive to use Virual Server 2005 R2.
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
I am not a VMware employee. The virtual machines you create in VMware Server have the advantage that they can be modified to run on ESX Server, and vice versa. Its kinda nice starting out with Vmware Server and then, when you budget gets approved, not have to reload those servers from scratch.
In terms of users who regularly use the service, Microsoft has almost an order of magnitude more users of Hotmail than Gmail has.... Somethign like 47 million vs 5 million (note: this is users who use the service on a regular basis, not total subscribers)
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I'm not a VMware employee. I don't work in marketing. Please hurt me (I kinda like it). I've just installed vmware server onto one of my dedicated servers to run Windows (a customer needs a windows server, be I'll be damned if I'm installing Windows directly onto hardware. Now if Windows spazzes out, I can vmware-console in, and recover). VMware's a rarity in software, it works better than expected. Definitely a fanboy here.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
I think one of the reasons MS is not competitive with VMWare is because VMWare actually benefits MS.
Since we introduced VMWare in our enterprise the number of MS virtual machines has skyrocketed.
Before if someone wanted a new MS server we had to purchase HW to run it on which is expensive and time consuming, where talking weeks to order and install.
Now we can provision a new MS virtual server in about 30 mins.
Once upon a time we would have tried to consolidate apps on physical servers to conserve HW, now each app gets it own VM, no more associability probs.
MS is getting paid for all these new virtual servers that would not have existed.
I'd say that VMware is not eating MS but feeding MS
I once was hired to record Novell's "Brain Share" users conference back in the early 90s. One of the speakers actually said in one of the sessions that, (paraphrasing a bit) "We've reached a point where Microsoft has conceded the network server space to us just as we don't try to challenge them on the desktop." What the speaker was implying was that Novell and Microsoft had found a way to co-exist. He said it so convincingly I can't help to think to this day that the poor guy actually believed it... and that may well have been why Novell is where it's at today rather than the dominant postition they had at the time in PC networking.