Please discontinue spreading your lack of understanding to the masses. Despite any "market lingo" and fancy schmancy analyzation that you would like to perceive you are capable of, you appear to be sorely detached from the real ground level work that happens in datacenters.

ESX server is not "on Windows Platforms", it is a custom linux kernel that provides the opportunity to install just about any platform that you might require. Is solves a problem not originated by Microsoft's server operating system team, but by software developers that write such poor and inefficient code that their software demands it's own server so it doesn't crash.

VMWare is is no real trouble from Microsofts Hyper-V. The feature set is firmly eclipsed by VMWare's product, not to mention the reliability and longer market exposure VMWare has had.

VDC-OS will fill a market that MS is incapable of working in because MS can only think "larger and more complex" when the real solution demands "simpler and smaller". VMWare's products are a golden key to the city of joy for all who embark on the journey of Virtualization. MS will never fill that niche. They are no longer innovators. They are caught up too tightly in their own massivity and political complexity.

I am a little skeptical of this VDC-OS business, but I am tired of the tech media picking on VMware. Who (besides maybe Microsoft) has a couple thousand production servers running on Hyper-V? Microsoft is about three years behind VMware features wise. VMware stock is threatened by tech journalists covering Hyper-V, but I don't know how much of an impact it will have on VMware's market share. And free or not free for the hypervisor license, all the money is in the support contracts and consulting.

The article seems to miss out on the fact that many of the fortune 500 companies (and others like quite a few financial institutes such as banks and insurance companies) are already in on the VMware boat and have large clusters up and running. The step from the current incarnation of VMware's infrastructure as it currently fills up many data centers to what they now call Virtual Datacenter OS is small and it is mainly an extension of the management products.

The hypervisor itself is not the core anymore of what they are marketing. Heck if you have a 100 CPU box with a terabyte of memory then you can download the FREE ESX3i product and start slicing up your server box. Now today, not tomorrow and no windows 2008 server tax needed It also supports a hell of a lot more as just windows and one linux flavor. Managing those infrastructures using the products from VMware is easy.

Not sure what the AS/400 remark is about as you cannot expect your mainframe to run within an X86 platform. It makes about as much sense as asking why it doesn't emulate an Xbox360... because it doesn't have to.

It is an absolute pleasure to work with the product and being able to take your virtual machines to so many platforms without any hassle. Taking your windows 2008 VM from the main cluster, run it on under a machine under linux without ANY changes, then use that again on your customers PC under windows to showcase some new SQL2008 features and finally - after dropping a CPU from the VM - use it to debug a SQL2008 problem on a Mac Book Pro while on the road is only possible with VMware. Show me another product that can do the same and I'll be happy to use it.

VMware is here to stay and if you don't like it.. then that's YOUR problem. :P

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Wila

Bravo, Wila , and Thanks for Virtually All the Key Code Source ....."It is an absolute pleasure to work with the product and being able to take your virtual machines to so many platforms without any hassle. Taking your windows 2008 VM from the main cluster, run it on under a machine under linux without ANY changes, then use that again on your customers PC under windows to showcase some new SQL2008 features and finally - after dropping a CPU from the VM - use it to debug a SQL2008 problem on a Mac Book Pro while on the road is only possible with VMware. Show me another product that can do the same and I'll be happy to use it."

"VMware is here to stay and if you don't like it.. "

Whats not to like? :-) I like IT........ ergo no problem.

With this article, Morgan has managed to - in the eyes of anyone familiar with VMware's entire product catalogue - embarrass himself horribly. The functionality is already there for almost every aspect of VDC-OS. VMware's products from the ESX &ESXi hypervisors to Thinstall application virtualisation, to Lab Manager, Stage Manager and VDI virtual desktop components, to Site Recovery Manager SAN Redundancy Management make VDC-OS the next logical step.

Of course it is only to be expected that those with a lot invested directly in the status quo would fear the kind of changes to come.

"Not sure what the AS/400 remark is about as you cannot expect your mainframe to run within an X86 platform. It makes about as much sense as asking why it doesn't emulate an Xbox360... because it doesn't have to."

Generally speaking you don't want to run a midrange or mainframe within a VM on an x86 platform (there may be some rare situations where hardware emulation is desirable but we'll ignore these for the purposes of this discussion).

However you completely miss the point... these platforms also allow virtualisation and therefore it *should* be possible for one tool to manage vm's across any number of platforms (not just x86 alone). Having a free hypervisor is no longer enough to succeed in the market... the focus has now moved to the next layer - the management tools (it is the management layer that has the potential to simplify IT administration).

I like VMWare - from my point of view it has been the main driver behind getting the market to where it is today, but now to maintain it's position as leader in the market it really needs to broaden it's horizons and recognize there is more to the IT world than just x86 and look at what it can do to simplify the management of VMs across ALL major platforms.

I hope you virtualizers are putting money into FOSS projects too. I already run Qemu images on Windows, Linux & OSX of Plan 9, Linux & Windows2k which I can control via the Qemu console or the virtual serial port (plan9 is particularly suited to this - no surprise there).

I'm not pretending to know anything about datacentres or speed comparisons etc. but money into FOSS is an investment, even if it just keeps competition around for the highly financed ventures.