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VMWare’s Mike DiPetrillo Openly Critical About Citrix – Xensource

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If you thought the leaked internal VMWare memo criticizing the partnership between Microsoft and Citrix was bad, get a load of this: Mike DiPetrillo, Specialist System Engineer of Industry Research and Competitive Analysis at VMWare (VMW) and one of VMWare’s bloggers, posted a rather critical blog post on his personal space yesterday attacking Citrix’ acquisition of Xensource.

Other than calling Xensource a ‘good little company’, DiPetrillo says he’s still trying to figure out why Citrix paid $ 500 million for it in the first place.

“In Q3 XenSource announced 1,000 customers. On the call they said they added another 400 customers. Good growth! That puts the total at 1,400 customers. Then came the partner count – 1,817 partners certified to sell XenSource. Hmmm. So now we have 1,817 partners trying to get business from the 1,400 customers that total $2 million in revenue (that’s $1,100 in revenue per partner). Good days to be a Citrix partner.”

He goes on to say:

“OK. So the strategy is go and spend $500 million on a company that’s losing money, switch all of your current successful products and branding over to the losing company, and then exit the market when your larger partner moves into the market. Is this the end of Citrix then? Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008 closes the gap pretty nicely. Virtual Desktops are also taking large chunks of market share. Time will tell where Citrix ends up.”

In the end, it’s fair critiscm and DiPetrillo does raise some good points, but coming from a VMWare employee (although published on his personal blog), the article is bound to make some people frown.

[Via Channel Marker]

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VMWare’s Newest Blog: Virtual Reality

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VMWare just announced that it’s adding a new blog on Virtual Reality to its blog network . In its debut post, Mike DiPetrillo touts about the 4 reasons why he switched to VMWare Fusion (other than being a VMWare employee). Here goes the list:

1) Stability. At the core of Fusion is the same engine we’ve been shipping with VMware Workstation since 1998. It’s in its 6th generation and just plain works. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve crashed my machine while running Parallels. For example, here’s a neat trick. Go start up your Windows XP VM in Parallels. Run something that uses a lot of CPU. For me that’s usually running MS Flight Sim. Now, go and suspend the VM. BAM! Crashes every time on several different machines. I’ve got 5 other tests I’ll blog on in the future where Parallels just crashes with simple tasks.

2) Battery Life. Even at idle, Parallels still uses about 15 – 20% of the CPU on my Macbook Pro. My battery only lasts about 1 1/2 hours on the road. Ouch! With Fusion it seems to run much cooler – about 0.5% of the CPU. My battery agrees and usually lasts about 4 hours on a single charge.

3) USB just works. Before switching to the Mac I had a HP Scanjet 7800. Great scanner. When I switched to the Mac and ran Parallels I couldn’t see or use the scanner anymore. There were no drivers for the Mac so I had to go to my really old Epson single sheet scanner I had laying around. Urggh. In comes Fusion to save the day. Right away Windows in a Fusion VM recognized the scanner and I became a much happier person (my wife would agree).

4) Performance. According to the CNET Crave Tests we really perform well. I tend to agree with that. I haven’t done any official benchmarks just yet but things are snappier with Fusion. Just do a search for “vmware fusion performance” and you’ll get several other opinions on the matter which pretty much agree that Fusion is faster.