(+4 rating, 2 votes)
Loading ...VMWare are very much on the radar at the moment. I’d be following them more closely, but the RSS feed on their website is seriously broken. VMWare put virtualization on the map, and as I digest the input from Interop in New York, and last week’s VMworld 2008, it feels like they are all over the map.
VMWare’s recent woes are well documented, a recent article on The Register gives a taster. Executive shuffles and iffy patches certainly haven’t helped the company’s image in recent times. But it isn’t all doom and gloom. The new CEO has been well received in some quarters and they have also announced a collaboration with Cisco to accelerate the virtualization of the data center.
The benefits of server virtualization are fairly widely understood (some of the main points were touched on in the “data center efficiency” post here a while back). Many people are also using VMWare on the desktop too, generally to support multiple operating systems at once. It is a big win for IT staff and programmers who have to cross between different platforms to get their jobs done. Virtualizing the OS means you get to work from one machine, but can quickly switch operating systems as and when you need to.
Things haven’t stood still on the server side though. The latest version of VMWare Fusion lets you go headless, meaning that the virtual machine has no consoles connected to it. Very useful in the data centre.
VMWare is also hooking itself to the Cloud, but not irrevocably so. Whilst they have strong competition, their technology remains strong. They know their space well and have responded to the challenges their users face.
With the introduction of new technologies such as VMotion (nicely explained in the depths of James Urquhart’s post on the VMWare and Cisco initiative) and vStorage, to go with vCloud – you get vNaming idea, right? – they continue to push the virtualization envelope.
– more seriously, the new features in VMotion are very impressive and should be well received by anyone who has to manage highly available systems.
Thanks for the kind words about VMware. As an aside, VMotion was a “new technology” in 2003, and we’ve been building value on it since then with tools.
Drop me a line (jtroyer at vmware) and I’ll see if I can fix the problems with our RSS feed. I’m very sorry about that.