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VMware Releases Open Source Virtualization Client

Posted by kdawson on from the not-before-time dept.

ruphus13 writes in with the news that VMware has finally decided to open-source its client for virtual desktops, releasing it under the LGPL. This was in response to intense pressure from the growing number of Linux distros that include virtualization by default. From the post: "The CEO replacement who entered VMware last year was Paul Maritz, a long-time Microsoft executive with intimate familiarity with how Windows swallowed up entire categories of utility software as it grew up by simply wrapping free utilities into the operating system. Paul knows about that, and he had to have seen last year the dual threats to VMware of open source virtualization offerings and virtualization on board in operating systems. The VMware View Open Client allows businesses to host virtualized desktops in the data center, and users can access their desktops from any device. Going with an open source solution like this was VMware's only choice, especially as Microsoft includes Hyper-V virtualization in Windows Server. I'm sure Maritz was very focused on the Microsoft threat, because he used to be behind similar threats. VMware can grab market share with this move, stave off Microsoft's dominance, and offer support and services around its open source offering.'"

51 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Thanks... by BlackPignouf · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Thanks, but I'm more than happy with VirtualBox, either open or closed source. Much faster & easier to install on my ubuntu boxes!

    1. Re:Thanks... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      VirtualBox and its ilk are competitors to VMware Workstation. When it comes to the datacenter, nothing comes close to their enterprise offerings.

    2. Re:Thanks... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      this is no VirtualBox competitor, it's a whole different product. it's the client for the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

    3. Re:Thanks... by Guspaz · · Score: 2, Informative

      I agree that it needs a lot of work, but it's also improving at a pretty decent clip. I tried it when I ran Ubuntu 8.04, and had a nightmare with the networking. By Ubuntu 8.10, the included version made networking a snap, making it easy to use host networking to simulate a device on my network.

      Another roadblock that was fixed in those 6-months; the older version couldn't boot Ubuntu Server (I believe it was a matter of VirtualBox not supporting PXE), while the newer version can.

    4. Re:Thanks... by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 2, Informative

      Somewhat. I find that in 2.x on a Linux host with an XP guest, sometimes the VM gets stuck and hangs, making you have to kill it. If this happens, not all of the memory allocated to the VM will get reclaimed, which is highly annoying.

      Only seems to happen, for me anyway, with XP guests. Linux guests and Win2K guests don't seem to have this problem.

      --
      My blog
    5. Re:Thanks... by whereareweheadedto · · Score: 2, Informative

      Have you used Xen in enterprise environment? Well, I did a pilot project last year and Xen is nowhere near there. Maybe Citrix XenSource, but not Xen.

    6. Re:Thanks... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Informative

      Mod parent up. This product is pretty much VMware's equivalent of the Citrix ICA client, not one of their virtualization setups. Looks like a shot across Citrix's bow to me. By releasing the client as LGPL, they can, in theory, ensure that it will be trivial for anybody putting together a linux distro or thin client image to include support for connecting to their VMware view stuff(which is, shall we say, unlikely to be OSS soon).

    7. Re:Thanks... by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yes. While Xen is not as easy to deploy as ESX Sever, it performs quite a bit better in my testing. I think this is because Xen is paravirtualization, so it saves overhead by using the drivers from the host's Linux kernel, plus it has a very small footprint.

      If you need cross-platform clustered filesystems, you might be better off with ESX as Xen doesn't include any, but you could always use a third-party solution. I haven't compared peformance on clustered filesystems, but I'll bet ESX's is a bit better in this regard. OTOH, if you're using a clustered storage appliance, then you might not really need clustered filesystems in your virtualization software.

      --
      My blog
    8. Re:Thanks... by whereareweheadedto · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Both are quite easy to deploy and Xen performs faster than ESX, but I never want to even think about running non-clustered virtualization solution. In this aspect does Vmware come in front. My bosses argued that the solution I select must have some level of official support and my free time is too valuable to spend saving 40 to 60 production virtual servers from crashing due to package update. I went to a Citrix presentation, where they showed us features of their Enterprise solutions. I must say that it worked flawlessly and I liked it, altough I am OSS fan. But final cost of Citrix solution is almost the same as Vmwares, if not higher. I was also considering using SLES10 Xen and Zenworks Datacenter management tools, which provide a high degree of availability, but in the end, when technical and financial aspects of every possible solution were compared, Vmware was clearly the solution we had to accept to achieve our goals. For next three years, we're commited to Vmware, but closely watching Xen. I hope I'll get to run it in a datacenter one day :) THe sooner the better.

    9. Re:Thanks... by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Both are quite easy to deploy and Xen performs faster than ESX, but I never want to even think about running non-clustered virtualization solution. In this aspect does Vmware come in front.

      I don't know. I had less trouble deploying ESX than Xen, but it might've been that I was using a somewhat pre-configured/tuned install image of ESX created by the company's operating systems group.

      Anyway, Novell sells official support for Xen via SLES and their subscription policy is that one SLES subscription covers all the VMs on the same machine. Hence, the Novell solution was cheaper.

      In the end they stayed with ESX, mostly because the CIO was getting kickbacks from VMware.

      --
      My blog
    10. Re:Thanks... by tweek · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Having done enterprise installations of both (pre-Citrix), vmware took the cake.

      The problem with Xen was the problem with a lot of open source "products". They may be superior in terms of resources or technology but they aren't "enterprise-ready".

      You can argue all you want about "hiring someone to hack on it" or "developing support tools internally" but those honestly don't fly except at a very specific company size. There are certain features and expectations that someone has when using something as core to infrastructure as virtualization and Xen isn't it (or at least wasn't at the time).

      --
      "Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
    11. Re:Thanks... by postbigbang · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Xen as Novell ships in SUSE 10.1/10.2 is dramatically better, if bereft of tools. xVM is also very good, but suffers the same problem. Adding value is the name of the game, and Maritz fights more than the lackluster implementations of Hyper-V. Ask Microsoft for their Windows 2008 sales numbers and watch them distract you from the question. It's selling like Vista, although it's not bad-- just difficult to value-justify upgrading to.

      xVM on the desktop or server is nice... but lacks compatibility that ESX and Xen-alikes are pounding them with. Xen has improved dramatically, even from versions of six months ago. Citrix/XenServer is decent, but the SLES 10.2 version is ready to rock.

      --
      ---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
    12. Re:Thanks... by whereareweheadedto · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It was the same with us. We could go for Xen and Novell, but when I talked to my superior, who is a cool guy he asked me, how comfortable would I feel, when something went south and entire company was offline. In such context, Vmware offerings look much better. Altough I have good experience with Novell support, I know that Vmware offers a better one for their products.

    13. Re:Thanks... by Znork · · Score: 2, Interesting

      but I never want to even think about running non-clustered virtualization solution.

      On a Xen or KVM solution you simply use the distribution's clustering software. Moving VM's is much simpler than most HA clustered applications usually run by such software.

      We'll be using the integrated Xen on RHEL5 for most linux virtualization needs, the price of ESX is one part, performance is another large part, and then add the lack of a linux VIC client, various driver issues yet another. And yes, that's in a datacenter setting.

      Personally I consider the debate pretty much passe by now; it's like discussing wether to run a third-party TCP/IP stack in the 1990's. Virtualization will be a built in feature like anything else, no more 'third party' than 'fork'. The attempts by VMWare to play up their management tools are irrelevant, the very fact that the built-in techs can utilize the entire OS as underlying capabilities for management and leverage every new development immediately simply means a single company working on proprietary tech hasn't got a chance to keep up.

      It's sad to see it happen, but IMO, VMWare have been sitting on their arse for five years cashing in. They could have been far ahead, and they could have dealt with most issues if they'd tried. Instead they're now stuck with a load of customers who use their products only for want of alternatives and who are now ditching ESX et al as each gets their requirements fulfilled elsewhere.

    14. Re:Thanks... by rathaven · · Score: 2, Informative

      You can use OCFS2 for clustered filesystem storage with Xen - if its good enough for some seriously scaled Oracle Database Clusters then a few host OS's (file backed) work well on it for most uses. We host Windows and Linux boxes on this with no issues.

  2. What about VMWare Player? by Ed+Avis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A popular way of distributing software - especially for people to try it out - is as a complete Linux distribution disk image that you can run with the VMWare Player. Is that program also going to become free? (If not, I guess it should be replaced with VirtualBox, but VirtualBox doesn't seem quite as polished.)

    As far as I can tell this is just a client application connecting to the VMWare View server, which is some kind of Citrix-like remote desktop server and remains proprietary. So no big deal, it appears.

    --
    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    1. Re:What about VMWare Player? by joemod · · Score: 3, Informative

      VMWare Player is already free but not opensource.

    2. Re:What about VMWare Player? by MBGMorden · · Score: 3, Informative

      Not only that, but VMWare Server (which uses the same "format" of vm) is also free. Their recent move to web-only admin tools has gotten annoying, but overall it's still very nice and lets you manage things much more in depth than VMWare Player does.

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
    3. Re:What about VMWare Player? by pedrop357 · · Score: 3, Informative

      As of the latest version, VMWare Server still (quietly) comes with the Virtual Infrastructure Client.
      For windows installs, it's here:
      C:\program files\VMware\VMware Server\hostd\docroot\client\VMware-viclient.exe

      In the field "IP Address/Name", use https://name/ or IP%:8333
      You need the VMware authorization and VMware Host Agent service running, but can disable the VMware Server Web Access service if you don't use the web interface.

      I do wish they would update the viclient to use later hardware versions. As is it is right now, if you want to use the viclient, you're limited to VMs with HW version 4 and you can't do change hardware or connect/disconnect higher level virtual machines without going to the web interface.

    4. Re:What about VMWare Player? by pedrop357 · · Score: 3, Informative

      I should have used preview
      https//NAMEORIP:8333
      insert the : after https

  3. The perceived value of high prices by erroneus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    VMWare's Workstation and advanced server products are expensive and companies have been buying them for quite some time as part of their infrastructure. Asking these customers to believe that "free" stuff is greater-than-or-equal-to what they have been spending thousands upon thousands of dollars on is like asking Christians to consider the notion that there is no god. They simply can't go there mentally.

    There is value perceived in spending lots of money on something. Take diamonds for example. They are NOT by any means "rare." Their beauty is debatable. But people perceive their artificially high prices as value even when faced with the fact that diamond "resale value" is nearly nothing by comparison. Some people think spending more money on things make them more worth while, more valuable, more elite. Starbucks built a nationwide chain on the idea. Clothing stores have been exploiting this perception for more than 100 years in the U.S.

    And then there are the commercial software vendors...

    1. Re:The perceived value of high prices by OnlineAlias · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You discount the fact that really big implementations nearly require VMware to work by simple virtue of the maturity of the product. By really big, I mean 1000 to 3000 guest servers and 10's of thousands of desktops. You think enterprise managers are going to go with Xen or Virtual box in these scenarios? Not a freaking chance. The marginal cost of the software is a pittance compared to the losses incurred when the project fails or even worse, when it sputters for a long time and then dies.

      Here are some numbers.

      VMware enterprise licensing and support= 2 mil.
      Server hardware, infrastructure and storage= 4 mil
      Professional services = 2 mil.
      Overall savings to organization in in heating cooling, data center, backups, personnel and equipment refresh over 5 years= 10 mil.

      Savings doing it with some other software= 500 grand (no one cares).
      Failed project = -16 mil.

      Comparing VMware to Starbucks as a luxury boutique product is nonsense. It is the only one that can and has actually delivered an enterprise capability.

    2. Re:The perceived value of high prices by setnaffa · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Erroneus needs to read up on TCO. Businesses live by evaluating ALL costs. Direct acquisition costs are only a small part of that. Support costs for open source ARE more expensive than for major vendors who supply training and other support. Just because something costs more to buy does not mean it costs less to operate. Windows-based sysadmins are easier to find than those who claim to know Linux... Supply and demand... Trust me or not. Your choice. The attacks on US-based Capitalism are totally non-sequitor and equally shallow.

    3. Re:The perceived value of high prices by TooMuchToDo · · Score: 2, Informative

      Amazon trusts Xen to drive it's entire EC2 cloud computing infrastructure. Which, may I add, also drive's Amazon's entire online retailing business. I'm sure it's ready for enterprise scenarios.

  4. Re:VMWare was always a doomed business. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You have no idea what you are talking about. VMware is far from doomed given the current "virtualize the moon" craze. Also, the fact that you called Sun's VirtualBox by the name OpenBox clues me into this fact. Also, the fact that you don't see HyperV as a threat to other virtualization systems, tells me you haven't played with it. It's fairly fast in a lot of performance tests, it's pretty damn stable compared to VMware, VirtualBox, and LVM. It also works for most Windows environment operations, something that you'll find other virtualization suites don't do. Not to mention the cost, free with a Windows Server 2008 license.

  5. Now how about an ESX Client? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Great, now let's have a GUI for Virtualcenter/ESX that doesn't require Windows.

    1. Re:Now how about an ESX Client? by LittleLebowskiUrbanA · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Agreed. Even a web client. How hard is that, VMware?

          What company builds their product on top of Linux and then builds a GUI client that only runs on Winders?

      --
      This guy is way out there
    2. Re:Now how about an ESX Client? by Alex+Belits · · Score: 2, Funny

      What company builds their product on top of Linux and then builds a GUI client that only runs on Winders?

      Citrix.

      --
      Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
    3. Re:Now how about an ESX Client? by LNX+Systems+Engineer · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I hit submit before finding the article, but VMWare was talking about clients for Linux, iPhone (uh, why?), and OS X back in September of 2008. 5 months later and nothing to show for it. http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/151194/vmwares_virtualcenter_coming_to_linux_iphone.html

  6. Too late by MistrBlank · · Score: 2, Informative

    I jumped ship to VirtualBox at the end of last year after being a long time VMWare Server user.

    Server's switch to a terrible UI on version 2.0 and the fact that they continue to charge for VMWare fusion made me look for alternatives.

    VMWare still has the best enterprise virtualization management products though in the meantime so I'm not terribly worried about them making a vanishing act.

    1. Re:Too late by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      VMware basically ruined whatever marketing value the zero cost VMware Server gambit provided. For those who aren't familiar with the drama:

      VMware Server 1.x contains a straightforward native client that works efficiently as a console for virtual machines. It's the same basic client VMware has used for the last decade or so across the produce line. It isn't perfect, but it is very usable, stable, etc.

      With the 2.x release they eliminated this client and replaced it with an enormous Tomcat+Java+Browser plugin mess that is slow, unstable, buggy, a memory hog and generally horrid.

      Oh, and the download size went from ~120MB to >500MB, installs to 1.5GB, erects a complete Tomcat stack and mangles your browser(s) with nifty new plugins.

      At one point VMware considered enhancing the new client to pop up goatse.cx images at random moments throughout the day to drive the last post-1.x holdouts to VirtualBox, but it turned out to be unnecessary. There aren't any holdouts.

      Tragic really.

  7. The clients free, but the server co$t$ by operator_error · · Score: 2, Informative

    VMware View Open Client lets you connect from a Linux desktop to remote Windows desktops managed by VMware View.

    http://store.vmware.com/servlet/ControllerServlet?Action=DisplayPage&Env=BASE&Locale=en_US&SiteID=vmware&id=ProductDetailsPage&productID=94648100

    VMware View Enterprise Starter Bundle + Platinum (24x7) 3 Year Support

    Including View Mgr 3, VC Foundation and VI VDI licensed for 10 desktop VMs (Includes 1 ESX license for 2 CPUs)
            $2,456.25

    VMware View Enterprise Starter Bundle + Platinum (24x7) 2 Year Support

    Including View Mgr 3, VC Foundation and VI VDI licensed for 10 desktop VMs (Includes 1 ESX license for 2 CPUs)
            $2,197.50

    VMware View Enterprise Starter Bundle + Platinum (24x7) 1 Year Support

    Including View Mgr 3, VC Foundation and VI VDI licensed for 10 desktop VMs (Includes 1 ESX license for 2 CPUs)
            $1,875.00

    VMware View Enterprise Starter Bundle + Gold (12x5) 3 Year Support

    Including View Mgr 3, VC Foundation and VI VDI licensed for 10 desktop VMs (Includes 1 ESX license for 2 CPUs)
            $2,303.25

    VMware View Enterprise Starter Bundle + Gold (12x5) 2 Year Support

    Including View Mgr 3, VC Foundation and VI VDI licensed for 10 desktop VMs (Includes 1 ESX license for 2 CPUs)
            $2,085.90

    VMware View Enterprise Starter Bundle + Gold (12x5) 1 Year Support

    Including View Mgr 3, VC Foundation and VI VDI licensed for 10 desktop VMs (Includes 1 ESX license for 2 CPUs)
            $1,815.00

  8. Re:VMWare was always a doomed business. by imcclell · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The problem to that is a matter of perception and money. It's not that there aren't other viable options, it's how people perceive those options. When you talk to a manager in a mid to large size business, every last one of them is aware of VMware, and every last one of them is aware of Hyper-V because MS was so vocal about it. You may see some Fortune 500 guys who are big Sun shops that may talk about OpenBox, but that's not the norm.

    So when the higher ups go out for lunch, are they talking about the open source virtual server? Probably not. They're probably talking about VMware or Hyper-V because that's what their friends companies are running.

    Also, when was the last time an open source vendor took a higher up to an expensive lunch or on a business trip?

    The worst part about corporate IT purchases is that they rarely have anything to do with quality or return on investment. They're usually made on a recomendation of a friend of a higher up, or back room deals. How many times have you seen a CIO go on an expensive all paid "business trip" from a company and all of a sudden you have an exclusive deal with them?

  9. Games? by chill · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The only reason I have a Windows image at home is for a couple of games. So far, only VMWare Workstation can handle Windows gaming with any decent speed since it supports DirectX. Do any of the other virtualizers work well with gaming? I'm talking about games like COD4, America's Army, and others based on the UT2/UT3 engine.

    --
    Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
    1. Re:Games? by syousef · · Score: 3, Informative

      The only reason I have a Windows image at home is for a couple of games. So far, only VMWare Workstation can handle Windows gaming with any decent speed since it supports DirectX. Do any of the other virtualizers work well with gaming? I'm talking about games like COD4, America's Army, and others based on the UT2/UT3 engine.

      It most certainly doesn't handle games with decent speed. Lets look at the game compability list, updated this month:

      http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-1287

      Now lets look at your games:

      COD4 - "Starts up fine, but too slow to play. Frame rate is about 2 FPS at 640x480 with all settings reduced to minimum. VM settings - 1.5GB ram, 2 VCPU's, optimize for VM."

      America's Army - Not on the list

      UT2/UT3 - Not on the list. Not sure which games on the list might be derivatives

      Other complaints even for games reported to work are "choppy sound, minor texture glitches", "Sluggish, but playable.", "Flawless; low FPS", "Flickery top bar and "Sticky" graphics"

      This does not sound to me like something a frequent gamer would put up with, when dual booting would give much better results.

      VMWare is to be applauded for their DirectX effort, but they're not quite there yet.

      --
      These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
    2. Re:Games? by chill · · Score: 2, Informative

      America's Army for Linux/Mac is 2.5 (4 or 5 version behind), and has ceased to be supported. There are very, very few servers to play on. There are rumors the new 3.0 client will be back for Linux, but I'll believe it when I see it.

      By UT2 I meant UT2-engine based games. Sorry for not being clear.

      --
      Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
  10. I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    VMware has too many products. I don't understand the difference between:
    • VMware Fusion
    • VMware server
    • VMware workstation
    • VMware view
    • VMware ESX
    • VMware Player
    • VMware ACE

    Is VMware viewer this product http://store.vmware.com/servlet/ControllerServlet?Action=DisplayPage&Env=BASE&Locale=en_US&SiteID=vmware&id=ProductDetailsPage&productID=94648100 ? If so, what does it exactly do for me? Can I create virtual machines? Can I open .vm machines? Can I connect to some remote server hosting and running the machines, like a VNC?

    Thanks,
    ~T~

    1. Re:I don't get it by BlackPignouf · · Score: 4, Funny

      Easy :
              * VMware Fusion is for Windows Vista Starter
              * VMware server is for Windows Vista Home Basic
              * VMware workstation is for Windows Vista Premium
              * VMware view is for Windows Vista Business
              * VMware ESX is for Windows Vista Enterprise
              * VMware Player is for Windows Vista Ultimate
              * VMware ACE is for Windows 7

      I think...

    2. Re:I don't get it by PrescriptionWarning · · Score: 3, Informative

      funny :)

      but seriously, VMware Fusion is for OSX only and offers desktop integration. The rest are for linux and windows. Server & Player are free, as is ACE i think, but the rest are generally for cost.

    3. Re:I don't get it by arkhan_jg · · Score: 4, Informative

      * VMware Fusion - desktop virtualization on macs, also allows you to run individual windows apps but they appear as a window on your OSX desktop. Not free.

      * VMware server - free virtual server hosting setup. Fairly basic, but allows you to run multiple OSes on a single physical server and linux or windows host OS, and have them provide services on the network - or RDP/VNC into them and use them for testing, etc.

      * VMware workstation - similar to vmware fusion, but for linux/windows, and without the 'open an app as a native window' feature. Not free. Designed to create and snapshot multiple vms on your own desktop.

      * VMware view - virtual desktops. You give your users their own personal desktop image, but it's stored on your ESX servers, not their local hard-drive. A bit like thin clients, but you virtualise the entire pc, not just the desktop. they break it with a virus? Spin them a new one off the spare pool, or bring their old one back from backup snapshot. Or just have a standard pool, and hand them out automatically as needed. Vmware view is the clientside app that lets them connect to their virtual desktop, but since all the virtualisation work is done serverside, the client can be low-power.

      * VMware ESX - enterprise grade virtualisation server. Combined with vmware infrastructure, you run a bare minimum hypervisor (no overhead from a standard linux or windows OS host), store your virtual machines on a SAN or NFS, have a pool of physical servers and automatically load-balance your VMs between them or even bring them back up automatically if a physical server goes bang. Nearly completely abstract your servers from the hardware, run 20 servers per actual piece of tin. Very much not free.

      * VMware Player - free basic app that lets you run VMs on your desktop, but not create them. Largely superceded by vmware server (now free) except for specific uses.

      * VMware ACE - packaged VMs. You create a VM with workstation, send it out, then they run the ACE package on their local PC, with a VM OS + app setup inside it. Allows you to have a standardised VM available on your desktop machines, without all the overhead of ESX, SAN, network etc, but your desktops need to be grunty.

      --
      Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
  11. VMware and Open Source by Comatose51 · · Score: 5, Informative

    VMware might not be a completely open source company but they've always been friendly towards open source software and make use of them. They've also contributed back as well such as extensions to the Linux kernel to make it run better as a guest in a paravirtualization environment, even though VMware can work using binary translation. They've also pushed heavily for an open VM format (OVF) so that users won't be locked into any specific virtualization vendor even though they're the dominant player in the market. They don't really see it as a zero-sum game. As long as virtualization as a whole keeps expanding, they benefit from it.

    They also created and open sourced Review Board.

    VMware is very engineer driven and engineers have a tendency to favor openness.

    --
    EvilCON - Made Famous by /.
  12. Re:VMWare was always a doomed business. by nschubach · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Not to mention the cost, free with a Windows Server 2008 license.

    That's not very free...

    --
    Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
  13. The big thing for me by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is that VMWare just fucking works. We use it at work and I'm real happy with it over all. It does it's job and does it well. I use Workstation on my desktop for managing images of lab machines (you can clone right out of the VM back to physical hardware, don't need to sysprep or anything if you took the original VM using VMWare converter) and we have a VMWare enterprise server for running some various servers on. We are working on virtualizing more as time goes on.

    I've played with other virtual solutions and I find them all lacking in comparison to VMWare. Some of it is in terms of user features. For example VMWare has an extremely robust and easy to use snapshot system in their Workstation version. Real useful if you are screwing around with software that might blow up your image, and it can branch if you start playing with multiple versions and such.

    A larger part would be that VMware seems to work well with all OSes. It runs Windows happily, it runs Linux happily, it runs OpenSolairs happily, etc. All the OSes I've tried with it run well and problem free. That's not the case for others I've messed with. They work well with whatever their favored OS(es) is but they don't work well or at all with others. Xen seems to work real well provided you are wanting to do Linux on Linux, but has problems with Windows. The MS solution I haven't played with much yet but I'm going to bet it doesn't care for Linux at all.

    As I alluded to earlier there's also how it deals with physical systems. VMWare has a program called VMWare Converter that'll nab an image of a physical computer, and convert it to virtual. Good for taking a system that needs to be virtualized but would be hard to reinstall. However it works real well the other way too. Symantec Ghost Solution Suite runs in VMWare fine and can take an image of the system. However you don't need to do that, GSS will read vmdk files directly. So you can go back from virtual to physical with ease. Also as I said when done right this works with no sysprep or any of that. So you build a base image on hardware and get the necessary drivers. You convert that to virtual. You then setup software in the VM, where you've got snapshots and the like in case something goes wrong. When that's good, hand teh VM disk to Ghost and have it push the image to all your client machines. This isn't theoretical, by the way, I do it all the time.

    I could go on but you get the idea. They do things better than others, or that others don't do.

    So while VMware certainly isn't the only game in town, it does seem to be the only one that does a really good job. The others are probably good if you are in a more limited situation. Like if you are an all Linux shop, ok maybe Xen is what you need. However if you've got a mix of OSes, or you need to mess with physical as well as virtual, or need advanced features, well then VMware is your best, and maybe only, solution.

    That may not translate to world domination, but should ensure a solid market. There's money to be made in doing things real well.

  14. Re:VMWare was always a doomed business. by tlacuache · · Score: 2, Informative

    Perhaps you're thinking of qemu and its accelerator module kqemu? I don't think this actually has anything to do with KDE or the "K team," as you called it, it just happens to have a k in front of its name.

  15. R U kidding? by hesaigo999ca · · Score: 2, Interesting

    > stave off Microsoft's dominance...
    I am sorry, everyone knows VMWare had dominance, and never lost it for visualization.
    M$ had to buy VirtualPC to compete, and even then could not make it work all that great.
    They now improved on the technology with HyperVM, but have yet to transfer any client base from VMWare's list of clients, and therefor still have not come close to dominance.

    I hate articles that are clueless about what they write, the writer wants to write a story about VMWare, but should stick with the facts, when they know nothing about the market shares involved.
    This will just add to the great lead that VMWare has over any other in the field.

    1. Re:R U kidding? by figleaf · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Netscape Communicator 4 was one of the worst browsers I have ever used.
      Netscape shot themselves by not releasing Netscape Communicator 5 in time. Netscape 4.5 was just 4.08 repackaged.
      By 1998, IE4 had already caught up and had better support for HTML, CSS and other recommendations than Netscape.

      VMWare on the other hand has been consistently releasing new versions with excellent new features and have maintained their lead.
      Superior products do win.

  16. Re:Meh by palegray.net · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah, just look at all those Linux and BSD boxes, crashing all the time. Good thing everyone uses almost nothing but Windows in their server farms these days.

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  17. Re:VMWare was always a doomed business. by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not to mention the cost, free with a Windows Server 2008 license.

    That's not very free...

    Microsoft offers Virtual Server for free as a standalone download. My understanding is that it's a minimal Windows Server OS as the hypervisor.

  18. Link to actual code (share and enjoy) by Xenophon+Fenderson, · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://code.google.com/p/vmware-view-open-client/

    You'd think that at least one of the technology news sites reporting this would link directly to the code, but you'd be wrong.

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  19. Re:VMWare was always a doomed business. by lwsimon · · Score: 2, Informative

    You meant VirtualBox OSE, right? OpenBox is a WM.

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  20. Re:VMWare was always a doomed business. by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Informative

    Microsoft offers Virtual Server for free as a standalone download. My understanding is that it's a minimal Windows Server OS as the hypervisor.

    Your understanding is wrong. Microsoft Virtual Server is an old MS product from the Virtual PC line. It does not have anything to do with Hyper-V.

    What you probably meant is Microsoft Hyper-V Server. And yes, that one is actually free too.