What VMware did next…?
Eric Siebert has written an interesting post on the techtarget.com website.
Basically, Eric’s premise is that VMware should or will likely release VMotion and HA for free – because, well Microsoft has. Out of the two products Eric rates HA over VMotion as feature.
I can see Eric’s point of view. And there is preceedent in the past – as MS try to compete on price – VMware comes back with the one-two punch on making a feature for free. Clearly, by MS “giving away” these features for free – its intention is to “put pressure” on VMware. As you can see really the MS position is trying (yet again) to create the (largely false) impression that VMware represents some kind of premium throughbred product which is “expensive”, and that the MS product is more cost affective.
Clearly, I would love VMware to become a charity and give all its products away for free. But I think by the following comment that we can all agree that both VMware and its competitors must make something from their massive software development investment. In my experience when something become free or bundled, pretty quickly the ISV loose interest in developing it and improving it. There has to be some pay back from them. In fairness most customers totally understand this – they work for commerical business too – the thorn issue has never been that vendors charge – but how much they charge.
In the main I find this feature-by-feature, cost-by-cost view of the world somewhat narrow. Like some how the whole of the VMware, Citrix or Microsoft offerings can be reduced and boiled down to a couple of features like VMotion and HA. The offerings from the respective vendors must weighed up and considered as whole, as often the sum is greater than their collective parts. Go down the Microsoft route – you will miss out on host profiles, distributed vswitches, FT, host profiles, DRS and DPM…
Anyway I see VMware and Microsoft offerings being quite different – and therefore hard to compare. Both offer hypervisors (ESX is best) and management tools (vCenter is best). But where VMware are weak, and MS strong – is the way their management tools hook into Windows running inside the VM. VMware is great, but they really don’t tell much about what is going on inside the guest operating system which in the main is Windows. The other thing that skews fair comparision is that assumes that the LiveMigrate of HyperV (which still hasn’t been released as GA code by the way) is an unknown quantity, and the same goes for Microsoft HA.
Anyway, the demand to make VMotion & HA free is big ask. It would mean making vCenter for free, perhaps as free-to-download Linux virtual appliance. Heck, we already have this for vi3.5 as part of a technology preview beta. Personally, I would prefer VMware to let vCenter go out for free – after all those folks who use the free ESXi product really don’t get any management tools. I feel fine with VMware charging for VMotion and HA.
Many people dismiss VMotion as some kind of nice-to-have toy. For me this is a bit narrow. If you have had to do BIOS updates or patch management of hypervisor the ability to non-intrusively carry these tasks out is critical if you want to aviod a maintenance window. Additionly, a solid and reliable VMotion process is mandatory for any higher level management tasks such as DPM, DRS, VUM and so on…. So for me it’s as critical a feature as HA….
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May 20th, 2009 at 9:56 am
I completely agree. And as for VMotion being a critical part of the package, I simply can’t see how it can be dismissed as just a nice to have tool. I guess those who dismiss VMotion as “Nice to Have” simply don’t work in enterprise environments where a single change request can take days to be reviewed let alone approved. The ability to move VMs from one physical box to another certainly makes life in enterprise IT bearable.
Just to get a simple change through to fix or enhance something on a physical host can be tough enough. Imagine doing the same change request but having to include “The following 15 systems will be unavailable…” in the impact clause of a change request? That kite is not going to fly mate!
My view, charge for VMotion. It saves a lot of time in the long run, and in this world time=$$money$$. Why complain about forking out some $$$ in the first instance if it’s going to save you money in the long term? Or, of course you can opt to go with MS and save the cash on licensing only to lose more cash on techie salaries and SLA breaches. It’s up to you.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Very well put Mike, I’d just offer one more thought.
A couple of years back the notion of VMware offering ESX free of charge was unthinkable (to VMware anyway). Now anyone that does not offer a free Type I hypervisor won’t get a seat at the table. And so we move on to discussing the need for vendors to offer vmotion and HA capabilities free of charge. In another 12 months or less this discussion point will be closed and anyone who does offer these capabilities free of charge will again be denied a seat at the table, and the focus will be on critical differentiating factors at the management and scalability layer. There will come a point when the give-aways will stop and vendors will establish more readily comparable pricing models, but I suspect it will be a while before we get there.