• VMware’s Platform Revolves Around ESXi, Except Where It Can’t

    August 29, 2017

    Building a platform is hard enough, and there are very few companies that can build something that scales, supports a diversity of applications, and, in the case of either cloud providers or software or whole system sellers, can be suitable for tens of thousands, much less hundreds of thousands or millions, of customers.

    But if building a platform is hard, keeping it relevant is even harder, and those companies who demonstrate the ability to adapt quickly and to move to new ground while holding old ground are the ones that get to make money and wield influence in the datacenter. …

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  • AWS And VMware Acquaint As Strange Cloudfellows

    October 17, 2016

    What happens when the world’s largest public cloud and the biggest peddler of server virtualization in the enterprise team up to create a hybrid cloud?

    A few things. First, the many VMware partners who have built clouds based on the ESXi hypervisor get nervous. And second, VMware very delicately and carefully prices its software low enough that it can have a scalable public cloud play but not so low that Amazon Web Services doesn’t end up having the pricing leverage that its parent company had with the book business a decade ago. And third, AWS uses the might of a …

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  • Inside VMware Before It Dons The Dell Invisibility Cloak

    August 30, 2016

    Where do you go when you are an infrastructure software provider that already has 500,000 enterprise customers? That is about as good and as big as it gets, particularly when the biggest spenders in IT infrastructure, the hyperscalers and the largest cloud builders, create their own hardware and infrastructure software and inspire legions of companies to follow their lead, often with open source projects they found.

    So VMware, which has grown into a nearly $7 billion software powerhouse, has done so in the only way that any company can that has reached such a saturation point in the market. Having …

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  • The Inevitable Slide As Server Virtualization Peaks

    February 8, 2016

    It has been just about a decade and a half since server virtualization juggernaut VMware debuted the first release of its ESX bare metal hypervisor, and nearly a decade since this hypervisor and its virtual machine guests had enough oomph to take on the job of encapsulating and consolidating multiple operating systems and workloads on since physical servers.

    The timing of ESXi 3.5 in 2007 coincided perfectly with the beginning of the Great Recession, and VMware, with a server virtualization stack that was arguably more mature and focused mostly on Windows Server workloads, was able to get dominant share of …

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  • CPU Virtualization In The Cloud: Getting Your Slice, And More

    September 30, 2015 Mark Funk

    In the first part in this series, we talked about the nature of processor virtualization on different systems and how this affects the underlying capacity and performance of compute in cloud infrastructure. It is important to understand the nature of the capacity that you are buying out on a cloud because not all systems and hypervisors virtualize compute in precisely the same manner. This has important ramifications for the applications that run on these clouds.

    You will recall that AWS provides at least two metrics for control: ECU (short for EC2 Compute Unit) and vCPU (meaning virtual Central Processing Unit). …

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  • CPU Virtualization: The Tech Driving Cloud Economics

    September 28, 2015 Mark Funk

    We can rent as much or as little compute capacity or storage or connectivity as we want, and we can get it when we want it. And we don’t have to maintain or account for any of that hardware. What a great idea, this cloud. Why hasn’t that been done long ago? And the companies providing all of those resources have been increasingly making it easy for us to use. Life in the IT world sure seems good.

    Those providing the cloud to us, though, know that – as with most everything – this good life comes with a few …

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  • First Ban The SAN, Then VMware

    June 9, 2015

    The conventional wisdom these days is that the server virtualization hypervisor is a commodity, and as the executives at hyperconverged infrastructure upstart Nutanix are putting it as they rev their software stack, “it is the new sheet metal for the cloud era.” While that makes a good metaphor, it is somewhat ironic, then, that Nutanix has cooked up its own hypervisor, called Acropolis, that can be placed at the heart of its server-storage hybrid clusters.

    Perhaps a better way of putting this, and one that reflects the true position of the hypervisor in the modern enterprise datacenter, is that it …

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