Readers Tell Us How They Would Run VMware
Virtualization Review Editor-in-Chief Doug Barney recently
asked readers what they would do if they ran VMware in this new age of increased competition and upcoming price wars. He got some interesting responses, some of which are posted here.
"What would I do if I was VMware? PANIC."
- Anonymous
"Well, I would ultimately slash the price of the ESX products, give
away the Workstation and servers for free (but have fees for
support), add more hardware vendor support or alliance, and publish
more books or best practice guide documents."
- Cornelio
"Here is a plan for VMware: Provide a hypervisor and a VM maker for
home users. Servers are where the money's at, but if you want users
to keep your name, you have to provide the same wares at home. Well,
maybe not the same, but something that will transfer readily between
work and home.
What I envision is a VM platform that would allow a home user to run
one or more OSes independent of the hardware. When it's time to upgrade your hardware to a better system, you just package up your
system as-is, copy it somewhere (online storage, DVD, whatever), get
your new machine and drop it down. How many people are forced to move
to Vista (for example) because they got a new laptop? If it were a
VMware microkernel, they could just mount their old OS on a new
system -- no fuss, no settings to reset, no new or significant
nuances to learn. No doubt people would pay a PC premium for this
ease of use, and it would knock down Microsoft significantly as it
cannot force a vendor to upgrade to its new OS package since any
VMware-ready machine would be OS-independent."
-Tom
"A price increase might work for Smirnoff vodka, but it won't work
for software. It's the death knell for VMware. Just ask your
corporate managers who will force you to go with the lower-cost
alternative -- especially from a name-brand vendor like Microsoft." -Mike
Let me ask another related question: Do you see VMware dropping the price of ESX anytime soon? If so, what is your predicted timeframe? Tell me.
Posted by Keith Ward on 07/22/2008 at 12:48 PM