Has VMware lost its mojo?

One of the things I appreciate about VMware Virtual Infrastructure is the iterative execution VMware has demonstrated. With most other vendors, incremental updates involve mainly bug and security fixes, but it's always interesting to see what new functionality is exposed when a new VI update comes out. I am a little concerned about the vending of cloud-flavored Kool-Aid, but I'm way more convinced of VMware's capability to deliver on robust, stable, fully-featured hypervisor code than on, say, Microsoft's ability to do the same. On the desktop front, it would be nice to see some greater maturity, and perhaps the new release of VMware View will provide that.

So far VMWare is the only one mentioned that gives me multi-platform virtual machines. Microsoft has not delivered a Linux solution for me. I know this doesn't matter to Microsoft, but it does matter to me. I think the rumors of VMWare's death are greatly exagerated.

Back when they went public there was a certain aura of too much perfume and lipstick. If you catch the drift.

On one hand I fear I may be uninformed enough to be speaking out of ignorance. On the other hand, I upgraded two ESXi 3.5 servers to ESXi4 last week and many of the new features I see there lead me to believe that VMWare is moving it's "Desktop" virtualization to the servers where it belongs. Consider that and the perspective that endeavour presented "VMware defined this market, the market has moved..." and I think we can once again conclude that Randal is writing useless fluff that only hurts Infoworlds image.

Uninformed. VMware never owned the desktop virtualization market. Citrix claimed that prize... what like 15 years ago? It still hasn't reliquished it's title of supremacy. VMware Workstation can run "virtual machines" and Citrix presents a user with either a "virtual" terminal or application but in my view Citrix gets the desktop and it's issues much better than VMware ever did, regardless of what you think VMware's "bread and butter" is. I do agree with the author that ThinApp is crucial to successfully fighting and chipping away at Citrix. Let ThinApp fall and VMware simply can't compete. However, did you know VMware makes solutions for the datacenter as well? You ought to check it out because they do some pretty fantastic work. (heavy on the sarcasm) The one place where I think they fall is in promoting all they do and having a clear, strong marketing message. It's challenging when they are constantly innovating. "vSphere" is getting all the attention but what about Heartbeat, Data Recovery, Chargeback, AppSpeed, Mobile Virtualization Platform, and on and on. Most of these products I'd venture most people (even IT people supporting VMware environments) don't even know what half of these products are and the funny thing is that many of them are even licensed already to use many of those products already! If anyone is sitting back and taking it easy it's VMware's marketing department. You think VMware is sitting back and taking it easy? Just go see how many of their datacenter products even existed a year ago, and I'm not even talking about vSphere which itself brings huge technological enhancements compared to VI3. We're way past the, "Well, VMware's the only one who has VMotion" argument.

They may lose it a few years from now, but definately not now. Vmware may have stopped moving forward on the desktop, but with cloud computing and centralized desktops, does that matter? On the other hand when it comes to server virtualization and the data center, no else comes close.

It appears you have been spending way to much time behind a desk writing and not enough where the real work is done. VMware is still the de facto solution when it comes to virtualization. comparing stability,useful features, and flexibility for a guest os's, everyone else is a year or two behind. Will they check up? yes. but my data center doesn't run in wishful thinking.

VMware's acquisition of SpringSource, 90% market share,14,000 VMworld attendees, recent debut of the revolutionary vSphere 4, and exceptional industry support indicate that it is still very much the industry leader and innovator. In short, it has plenty of mojo. Read more at www.bythebell.com

There's don't seem be any shortage of berks and lazy journalist today, cooking up half-baked and ill-informed non-sense because they seem incapable of actually writing a story which contains real news. I mean come on. VMware has lost mojo? As if! I notice these pundits who write this sort of unmittagated claptrap - never remind us how utterly breft of innovotions/ideas companies like Microsoft. With the huge release that is vSphere, VMware still has its mojo....

I use VMware Workstation. Lots of people use VMware Workstation. And many, many people love VMware Fusion (which is workstation for the Mac). But Workstation is NOT the Enterprise Desktop. Never was, never will be. If you want to talk Enterprise Desktop, then you need to be talking VMware View. Now you can compare VMware with with Citrix, etc. But hey, doesn't VMware have some other products? I think the product name starts with "v" ... :-) When people say VMware has 80% of the virtualization market, this is what they are talking about: server virtualization, not desktop virtualization. This is VMware vSphere (ESX, ESXi, VirtualCenter, Lab Manager, etc. etc.) It seems that Randall can't tell the difference between these three very different product lines. It makes me wonder what other clues he is missing. I certainly don't trust anything he has to say about VMware. [This post is my own opinion. It is not endorsed, approved or vetted by my employer.]

VMware has lost its mojo. They have failed to fix the problems with the VMware communityname-required login bug, and have thousands, to hundreds of thousands of users locked out of their beta testing, though invited. VMware support has been incompetent, although a trouble ticket has been open with them now for 3 months. I am exactly the kind of power user that is likely to switch now that VMware is neglecting us. F*** VMWARE!!!!!!!!!

Wow, this is a horrible piece by the author. Where in the world have you been? I'm a current Fortune 100 VMware customer and haven't been more pleased. vSphere is shaping up to be one of the best and innovative products around virtualization. The features alone will keep customers like me around for the next 5 years. I don't mind opinion pieces, but sheesh, do some freaking research first. No wonder I don't subscribe to this magazine...

Well this is sad, a community and an author not able to come to some sort of agreement of what is important to them. I would expect Infoworld is focused at the medium to large business user, who doesn't really care about how Workstation is doing. All businesses are being forced to save money any where they can, and VMWare is good to NOT waste developer time on their low brow products. I personally use VMWare Server in place of Workstation for a number of reasons, mostly because I use it anywhere I can't use ESXi.

Here is how VMWare is keeping people happy - saving them money. ESXi is free / ESX you license. Both run great on that 3 year old server that's sitting idle in the back room. It will allow you to P2V your old NT4/Windows 2000 servers running critical apps that you can't upgrade to newer hardware or can't spend the consultant time to move to a new server.

You want slow IT? How about not having to invest in new hardware to test out that new product. Got an initiative that is missing any buy in from above, you can get it up and running without new hardware purchases because you run a virtual backend. It doesn't care what OS you use, and won't take down the entire environment if it dies.

How's that DR/HA planning coming? Using VMWare and Doyenz, I can replicate your entire company out of your building to the cloud. Want to test a patch? Sure thing - I can do it without impacting the production environment. Building burn down? Easy - here's data we're going to download and you'll be back up and running in a few hours. Not fast enough - here's where we're going to power up your ENTIRE COMPANY IN THE CLOUD. It's Sunguard on the cheap - and it works.

I'm not saying there couldn't be more supporting information to this article but, I can imagine that those that support the VMWare environment only support the VMWare environment. This is typical in many situations whether talking about virtualization, databases or email messaging systems. I think VMWare has a good product but is way over priced and is losing it's edge in many thanks to XEN based hypervisors. The only reason VMWare has started to reduce it's pricing is clearly because of the competition from mainly the XEN hypervisor and Hyper-V. Hyper-V in my opinion won't really be a big threat. However XEN is definitely a huge threat to VMWare. In some recent tests the only place VMWare beats on performance is when you oversubscribe processors. For the most part this is really not an issue. I happen to use XEN with SLES11 and SLES11 high availability extensions from Novell and yes as far as HA/DR I would put this up against any VMWare equivalent for a fraction of the cost. I have cluster the nodes using more cost effective hardware, my VM's automatically start if one fails it will automatically start on the other node which I want it to fail to. I can do live migration, I snapshot and backup live. There really is not much I can't do and basically it supports various operating systems as well. The only thing I don't have is policy based moves based on hardware utilization and if I want that I would use PlateSpin which yes is a superior product in VM management to VMWare's offering. All things considered I am sure that most will disagree with this post it is hard to get people to see that there are alternatives that are just as good if not better. I just wish people would try the alternatives before they comment on them.