VMware, a Falling Giant?

New submitter Lashat writes "According to Ars Technica, 'A new survey seems to show that VMware's iron grip on the enterprise virtualization market is loosening, with 38 percent of businesses planning to switch vendors within the next year due to licensing models and the robustness of competing hypervisors.' What do IT-savvy Slashdotters have to say about moving away from one of the more stable and feature rich VM architectures available?"

Comments

Re:Microsoft Virtual PC

[motd2k]

Chalk / Cheese? Virtual PC is positioned no where near VMWare - try HyperVM/Xen/KVM

I ca see why

[liquidweaver]

We use OpenNebula/KVM here.
Both are free as in speech, I can do live migration, it's easy to manage, etc.
I'm running the whole thing on an NFS share from an AoE storage backend.
100% libre software solution, and it kicks ass.

Good luck vmware.

Re:I ca see why

[liquidweaver]

I'd imagine they could call anyone on our team, including myself. We know the code intimately at this point, and have put it through extensive testing.
This is more of a problem in the proprietary wold - there is a certain point that when something doesn't work you are forced to call for support because the logs only say so much. If you can trace the software and have access to the source, you honestly don't need to call anyone. At that point, it's just a matter of your own determination and the skill set of your team.

As an aside, we did not have to address P2V migration, because this was part of a new product offering. We are considering replacing our internal infrastructure with this, but that's probably going to happen gradually over time. We have very few windows servers left, and I'm frankly considering phasing them out so we don't have to go through the hassle of activation and the big problem Windows has with changing hardware.