VMware, a Falling Giant?

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Posted by Soulskill on Friday November 4, 2011 @05:15AM from the netcraft-yet-silent dept.

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?"

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VMware is obsolete technology by Anonymous Coward · 2011-11-04 05:32 · Score: 5, Interesting

First of all let me say VMware makes one rock solid hypervisor. Out of all of the hypervisors I have used theirs is the least prone to issues.
VMware has a couple of really BIG problems in their platform.
1. Their management tools are windows centric and so is Virtual Center for that matter
2. Their licensing model is confusing as hell and requires a spreadsheet to figure out what you need without overpaying
3. They have so many products that it gets downright confusing to determine which one works for your purpose.
4. They use "old school" sales tactics that just don't work for more modern companies.
When I am engineering a solution and have a problem to solve I am presented with many challenges to present VMware as a solution. Finding the product that suits our needs, Figuring out what license would suit our needs, getting a quote from the vendor without a lot of harassment after the fact trying to close the sale. Rather than deal with all of that many people have found that the open source projects like KVM and XEN are good enough for their needs. Not to mention the huge numbers of free cloud products such as Openstack that gives you enterprise features "for free". At the end of the day I don't care what product get's used as long as the problem is solved with the minimal amount of budget and effort.
A small startup does not want to deal with legacy software and maintaining licensing and dealing with windows boxes. They do great with the "enterprisey" douchebags with their complex setups that cause more outages than they solve but lean and small companies don't want their stuff.
The reality here is the world is slowly changing. Big monolitic companies are failing because their business models are unsustainable without cheating and people are getting fed up with the cheating. VMware has to answer a question to themselves. Do I want to serve the needs of the dying dinosaur companies or do I want to be in business in 10 years?
1. Re:VMware is obsolete technology by sexconker · 2011-11-04 06:21 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  VMware has a couple of really BIG problems in their platform.
  1. Their management tools are windows centric and so is Virtual Center for that matter
  2. Their licensing model is confusing as hell and requires a spreadsheet to figure out what you need without overpaying
  3. They have so many products that it gets downright confusing to determine which one works for your purpose.
  4. They use "old school" sales tactics that just don't work for more modern companies.
  Your first point is slowly becoming less of an issue. With vSphere 5 you can now run a Linux appliance for Virtual Center which will do for starters, and it doesn't even require (or support) an external database. Hopefully this will expand to be the only way to get VC, but they'll expand it to use a DB when you get big enough, and make plugins work with it. There's also supposed to be a '75%' web client, e.g. good enough for 75% of tasks and a full web client in the next major update, (5.5?) That's how VMView has been for at least the last major release too, the previous might have been web too, I can't remember.
  They have a lot of products because they do a lot of things... regular old server virtualization, enterprise grade server virtualization with HA, desktop (I want a test box), desktop (VDI), disaster recovery (with a replicating san), disaster recovery (without a replicating SAN)... If you don't know what you want to do, looking at their product sheet won't help you any.
  I'll give you that vRAM is evil and sales people are douches, but isn't that one a given?
  I defy you to go to VMware's website and tell me what the current version of ESXi is, what the free license includes, what the cost is for an academic institution that wants the cheapest licensed version, what features that includes - with specific descriptions, not just names and vague "Enable more robust blah blah" horseshit, and what exactly you would need to download.
  The site is intentionally a mess in order to trick people into buying more than they need. It also makes getting updates and changelogs near impossible because you never know what version of what shittily-named product you have. They recently went to ESXi 5, and there was a press release that touted hundreds of new features, and explained about 5 of them in the vaguest detail possible. There are links to various pages on their site to learn more about the hundreds of other new features, but that information simply doesn't exist. All you can get is the shitty presser.
  And look at this fucking 10 page topic on "Is there a free version of ESXi 5?". http://communities.vmware.com/thread/320883
  The short answer is "Yes, just install it with no license.", but the real answer is there is no fucking specific license for a free version, so there is no guarantee it will remain an option, or that anupdate won't break it, or that your trial license won't be invalidated at some point, or that features won't be turned off for no reason as they did when going from ESX 3 to ESX 4 / ESXi 4.
  VMware is fast approaching IBM and Cisco levels of intentional ambiguity. All they need is a shitty "brand awareness" marketing campaign that doesn't feature a product or service, but shows school kids in china teleconferencing with school kids in the US, with no lag, in the middle of the day at both locations.
Re:Virtualbox was always my favorite by Desler · 2011-11-04 05:38 · Score: 5, Funny

Expensive, bloated and chock full of unnecessary middleware and abstraction layers? That's usually what "enterprise software" means.
Re:Virtualbox was always my favorite by Znork · 2011-11-04 05:57 · Score: 5, Funny

Enterprise Solution - Solvent used for dissolving piles of cash in corporate vaults.