Slashdot Mirror
Intel Invests $218M in VMWare, Preparing for IPO
RulerOf writes "TechNewsWorld is carrying an article detailing that Intel has made an investment in VMWare for $218.5 million in anticipation of VMWare's imminent IPO. With an expected value of $23-25 a share, VMWare's IPO shows a value of $950 million. This investment brings Intel to an approximately 13% ownership of the EMC subsidiary, and helps to strengthen ties between the two companies. According to the article, 'VMware's virtualization platform runs on Intel architecture and most deployments of the tools are on systems using Intel chips.'"
Well, considering that VMWare has been rushing to put together a Mac VMWare long since Bootcamp came out...
VMWare has always been targeting the Linux and Windows server markets. Abandoning AMD would be a shotgun to the foot.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
The IPO is only for about 10% of the company, and Intel has pre-purchased about a quarter of that stock, so that would be about 2.5% of the new VMWare that Intel will own. Or at least that's what all the other reports are suggesting.
[Disclaimer: I work for EMC, but have no connection to VMWare; I have no inside knowledge of the IPO or related transactions.]
VMware's association with intel brings to mind some questions related to Trusted Computing. Now setting aside whether or not you like trusted computing, it does enable some valuable applications so it's going to happen. Now is all the implementations I've seen described there is a progressive trust is creates as each layer of the os-middle-ware-applications-data validates the next layer is unaltered. And all this starts with some trusted boot loader.
it's difficult to see anyway that around not having this seed trust be in some piece of unalterable hardware. And even though they are not doing trusted computing I would specualte that apple puts in a few hardware doo-dads so the software can validate it's running on apple hardware. (they may not be taking advantage of this yet but I bet it's lurking).
So then since it's likely that intel will be making the trusted computing hardware, will they grant the ability to emulate the hardware to their VM?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
My only hope is that Intel doesn't skew it's architecture so much that it becomes incompatible and that AMD is left behind. Would be nice if AMD could partner up as well, or create a consortium for "next gen architecture and virtualization enhancements" kinda like how MMX, SSE etc came about for graphics.
Too late - it's already happened. Intel and AMD have incompatible virtualisation technologies. Intel's is called VT with various sub-designations such as VT-d for virtualising DMA. AMD's is called AMD-V and is completely different. AMD have sub-divisions too, such as support for Nested Page Tables which Intel are still developing.
Xen supports both. Not certain about VMWare, but I'd be surprised if they didn't support both too. One interesting fact is that hardware virtualisation isn't faster than software approaches like VMWare's emulation or Xen paravirtualisation. Although this will probably change in future (and also Xen paravirt is no good for you if you want to run Windoze or other binary-only OSes).
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
VMWare has always been targeting the Linux and Windows server markets. Abandoning AMD would be a shotgun to the foot.
If history has taught us one thing it's that you should never underestimate the ability of companies to shoot themselves in the foot.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
EMC is retaining 90% ownership of VMWare, and is IPOing shares representing 10% of the company. That 10% is expected to bring in $949 million, giving the whole company a market capitalization of around $10 billion.
2.5% of $10 billion is around $250 million of course.
See http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4223741314.html
It looks like they want to make sure good virtualization software is available on their processors.
Bootcamp is NOT like vmware...bootcamp is just a boot manager that lets the intel mac reboot into windows...it probably has some bios emulation stuff, but its no vmware. Vmware runs different virtual systems simultaenously....not just one at a time.
From http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/
Run Windows natively
Once you've completed Boot Camp, simply hold down the option key (that's the "alt" key for you longtime Windows users) at startup to choose between Mac OS X and Windows. After starting up, your Mac runs Windows natively just like a PC. Simply restart to come back to Mac.
It's not that VMWare doesn't work on AMD chips, I run VMWare on several AMD's and it works just peachy. What they're getting at is support for a hardware Hypervisor. The hypervisor is that spiffy little bit of logic that keeps track of x86 instructions inside of a CPU and determines which machine, real or virtual, that said intruction belongs to. Traditionally, this has been done in software, but porting that intruction set over to hardware, as Intel has done, and I believe AMD won't be doing until their quad core line comes to market, significantly improves the speed of virtualization to the point where there is no difference between a real OS and a virtualized one (except for multi-OS overhead, of course). That was one of the whole points of that "Blue Pill" idea some months ago.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
one of these days they are going to run out of feet.. and have to start on the knee caps
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Sounds like the perfect investment plan to me - As long as they create a snapshot, if it all goes badly they can just push the right button and go again.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.