Slashdot Mirror
VMware Releases Open Source Virtualization Client
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.'"
VirtualBox and its ilk are competitors to VMware Workstation. When it comes to the datacenter, nothing comes close to their enterprise offerings.
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
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...
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.
Great, now let's have a GUI for Virtualcenter/ESX that doesn't require Windows.
this is no VirtualBox competitor, it's a whole different product. it's the client for the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.
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?
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).
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~
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.