VMware reported third-quarter results on Oct. 21 that said it grew 14% over its third quarter last year. That sounds about right for a company under pressure from Microsoft’s free Hyper-V and open source code on one side, and Amazon Web Services and other cloud suppliers on the other.
It’s called the commoditization of the virtualization market; everyone’s heard about it. And I’m here to tell you, it isn’t happening, at least not in the way that Wall Street analysts assume it is. It’s coming, as surely as the next ice age, but VMware keeps putting new management products on top of the data center’s virtualized environment. It’s started reaching out to manage other types of virtual machines. In various ways it stays three steps ahead of commoditization’s noose.
How can that be? Don’t market survey figures show Microsoft’s Hyper-V gaining faster in the marketplace and pushing out VMware’s ESX Server? Yes, in some cases, but not as much as the commoditization theory would suggest. Hyper-V supplies solid virtualization, and it’s being implemented in remote offices, business units and divisions that don’t need all the bells and whistles of a VMware vSphere environment. So market research from various sources shows Hyper-V growing faster than ESX Server.
But virtualization is more than the adoption of a hypervisor at this point. Its devotees have moved from server consolidation to sophisticated virtualization, a kind of pre-cloud environment where they wish to manage servers, storage and networking all as flexible, pooled resources. They want to move virtual machines around as they try to juggle host workloads, shut down the electricity consumption by underutilized servers and build in a disaster-recovery failover plan.