RSSCan VMware hold on?
We've seen Microsoft coming after them in it's own clumsy but powerful way, and various cloud-based offerings threaten the company at an even more conceptual level, but now old-school terminal services firm Citrix is coming back into the fight with a free version of XenServer and a new partnership with Microsoft. VMware has long offered a single-server version of its ESXi hypervisor for free, as does Microsoft with its own Hyper-V product, so you might be asking yourself, "Why is Citrix so late to the 'free' party?" But that question is largely beside the point; it's the deal with Microsoft that provides the real threat.
VMware's edge in the field has long been their deep and mature management platform. Neither Citrix nor Microsoft have been able to build anything quite so robust and effective even as their core virtualization technologies have improved, and sometimes even exceeded those of VMware. Combined, however, XenServer's datacenter oriented features and Microsoft's cohesive System Center management suite might begin to approach the level of control that VMware offers.
VMware has little with which to counter this onslaught. They suffer from the reality that their product is already mature and there are relatively few winning features left to develop to differentiate it from the competition. The recently announced Virtual DataCenter Operating System (VDC-OS) seems to be what the company is gambling on, but I haven't yet seen anything which significantly differentiates it from System Center. If you're virtualizing Windows anyway, why do you want a third-party management product if you have already shelled out for the Microsoft version and it has comparable capabilities?
VMware has had a tough row to hoe for some time now and a series of unfortunate events at particularly bad times have hit the company even harder than it would have been already. Will it be able to survive this latest onslaught, or should you be looking at alternatives for your virtualization platform before the rug comes out? It's a complex question that I don't have a solid opinion on yet. But I'm looking pretty hard to Hyper-V and System Center these days for long-term technology investments.
Also, people will need to consider the security of this program, and the implications for their antivirus software.
Citrix isn’t exactly late to the free party, as there has been a free single-server version of their hypervisor for about as long as Hyper-V has existed.
Interesting. I wasn’t aware of that; I know Xen itself has always been free, of course, but Citrix is making quite a fuss over this if it’s something they have already offered (albeit with fewer features).