
Why Dell’s EMC Bid Leaves VMware Looking Like Devalued Currency - walterclifford
http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-dells-emc-bid-leaves-vmware-looking-like-devalued-currency-1444679221
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dogma1138
I'm pretty VMWare's stock devalued it self. VMW Workstation is still the best
out there in desktop visualization, but VMware has been losing market share to
Microsoft and FOSS software the likes of Xen for some years now.

HyperV is essentially free in the MSFT ecosystem, and thanks to Amazon and
other cloud providers opensource hyper-visors especially those based on Xen
and KVM these days are mature enough and have a good enough eco-system for
large scale enterprise deployments. Docker and other containerization
solutions have also took a big chunk of VMWares potential market space in the
enterprise market.

Add to that that allot of VMWare's technology the likes of ThinApp never
panned out really and the free version of vSphere Hypervisor has now enough
"enterprise" features to be an actual viable solution for production VMWare
hasn't been looking that good for quite a while.

They still make great products but I'm not sure they had a clear business plan
and a killer app for a while now.

~~~
ckozlowski
I agree with a lot of this. I definitely feel as though they're getting a lot
of pressure from the cloud providers by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft.
VMware of course is starting their own offering, but it's a fork-lift of
vCloud.

VMware, in my opinion, is still the best as providing a shop with the tools to
create their own IaaS. They've the best hypervisor and the best tools. But the
number of organizations that /need/ their own private cloud is diminishing,
and I feel like the hyper-converged players like Nutanix are rapidly catching
up with them. (When I saw the Acropolis announcement, I thought, "Well, that's
it.")

Running your own datacenter is hard, and expensive, and people are gonna want
to get away from it. It was great a decade ago when we were first discovering
virtualization, but we're moving beyond IaaS now. AWS and Azure offer more
than just virtualization, they're offering a platform. There's a growth path
beyond IaaS for their offerings, whereas VMware will be entrenched in the IaaS
space for a long while.

I'm a virtual infrastructure engineer by trade, and I work exclusively with
VMware (right now). It's great tech, but it's yesterday's tech.

~~~
hhandoko
Is there a big gap between the best hypervisor and the free one? i.e. VMware
(Workstation / Fusion) vs Virtualbox

I use Vagrant + Ansible for dev work, do you think it's worth it to spend a
bit of money to pay for VMware and its Vagrant provider?

~~~
dogma1138
Depends what is the host and the guest, Virtual box works pretty well on most
hosts but the guest quality for Windows hosts is still questionably although
it has generally improved.

If you need 3D acceleration especially with Windows guests then it's pretty
much VMware for either Mac, Windows or Linux or Parallels for Mac.

Performance wise VMware is still quite faster than VirtualBox in most cases
and if you need to run a fairly complicated virtual network than VMware is
pretty much your only the way to go.

When it comes to a Windows host if you have the pro version of Windows you get
HyperV which as long as you don't need a complicated network is actually
better than VMware workstation in many aspects, it's linux support is lacking
but if you only run popular distro's like Ubuntu you should be fine.

HyperV is much better in terms of performance in edge cases, and it also more
gentle when it comes to power consumption so it won't kill your laptop's
battery as much as VMware workstation.

