vmware

Dell Reportedly Plans To Give Away VMware ESX Server 3i For Free, World Keeps Turning

March 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters 4 Comments

According to The Inquirer, it appears Dell is considering to stop charging VMware ESX Server 3i licensing fees on its PowerEdge servers to its customers. This was reportedly said by VMWare’s Senior Product Marketing Manager Martin Niemer and comes two weeks after the virtualization vendor announced it would start embedding the 32 MB hypervisor across Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM servers.

This doesn’t come as a big surprise, as VMware had added to the previous announcement that hardware vendors would be able to choose which premium they would charge to end customers, if any. Expect the other hardware vendors to follow suit and drop the prices for including the hypervisors significantly (or even zero) if Dell comes through, especially with the sharp-priced Microsoft hypervisor Hyper-V on its way.

But don’t expect this to have a serious impact on the whole VMware reseller channel’s bottom line, as some blogs are proclaiming already. The real money is in the enterprise offering and upgrades anyway, and the smaller distributors and resellers have other advantages when it comes to SMB offerings besides pricing.

Website Tip: VM4All.com

March 13, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

A small pointer to an online resource you may find to be very useful: courtesy of Eric Sloof from The Netherlands, you can browse a complete repository of VMware tools at VM4All.com, including their licensing terms, description, creator credits and link to download / maker.

From the about page:

VMware’s virtualization technology has become the industry standard for virtualization in the enterprise. More and more people are writing software based on the SDK and created a lot of little handy tools. On the other side there are some larger company’s who also created all kinds of applications to support VMware ESX server and Virtual Center. The vm4all.com website provides a complete list of all these tools and applications.

Get Maximum Exposure: Hire A Blonde Executive Who Forgets Your Virtualization Company Slogan But Knows How To Do Card Tricks

March 12, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Never one to shy away from extensive research, Virtualization.com has analyzed its visitor statistics for our extensive VMworld Europe 2008 video coverage, proving that eyeballs for interviews don’t necessarily follow the trail of the most reputable interviewees or eloquent answers. Allow us to share a few proven online marketing techniques, which apparently skew the video metrics and raise exposure dramatically:

Blonde female executives get more attention than male gurus

For reasons beyond our understanding, the Virtualization.com audience prefers watching a smart blonde female executive 4 times more than a seasoned male expert from the virtualization trenches. Our professional advice: start shaving your legs, guys …

CEOs who pretend to forget their great company base line

We love technology gossip sites like Valleywag.com . And apparently, your hard-to-reach target audience of CIO’s, venture capitalists & IT managemers is much like us and seems to spend less time analyzing dull virtualization reports from Gartner or IDC and more time on popular, snarky tech blogs. Raise the attention you get from folks at Silicon Valley by instructing your foreign language CEO to make a remarkable introduction (over 1.600 views and counting). Make sure to reference the interview on your own corporate website too, so nobody misses out on it. Lots of free publicity guaranteed!

Demonstrations are more attractive when popular YouTube keywords are included

Due to the nature of flash video hosting websites, it always helps to spice your boring software product presentations with some interactive tricks of general interest. Card tricks prove to be such a popular category on YouTube (26.000 results and counting). This is also how the Marketing Manager with Veeam garnered a lot more attention for his VMworld booth during the event and for ever after on those flash video hosting platforms … After the magic, he continues with a demo on their software solutions. Unfortunately our web analytics do not reveal how many of those card lovers understand the tricks & benefits Veeam software could provide them.

For now the PR and marketing officers at Veeam seem to rule at this game and take away the main prize for maximizing their VMworld Europe 2008 exposure with a double entry in this Top 3!

We are already looking forward to our interview with the naturally blonde Diane Greene, CEO of VMware. At this point, it’s unclear if she knows about the foreign-accent-amnesia combined with card-trickery skills the interviewees above seem to have mastered. But we promise to dig into the matter!

Which Deals Will HP Be Announcing Soon?

March 7, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Reuters is reporting Hewlett-Packard is set to announce a series of deals this month expanding the server virtualization software it sells with its servers, quoting HP Vice President Mark Linesch.

HP is already working with VMware, Citrix and Microsoft on customizing their software and Hewlett-Packard’s computer servers so they work together better out of the box, Linesch said, but declined to specify which companies the deal announcements would apply to.

We’re following Reuters’ perspective on this and think the most likely is Citrix Systems, which reportedly claimed earlier that close partnerships with HP and Dell would be announced in the course of 2008. Citrix has said it would get a payment for each HP server shipped with a basic package and a larger license fee for each upgrade sold.

What do you think the announcements will be?

Preinstalled Hypervisors And The Future of Operating Systems

March 5, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Jay Lyman from The 451 Group (also check out the interview we did with John Abbott, Chief Analyst & Research Director at The 451 Group) wonders about the future of Linux distributions in the virtualization arena.

Now that VMWare announced that it will embed its ESX 3i hypervisor in different server platforms from HP, Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens and IBM, the question pops up how Operating System Vendors will deal with this change of platform.

VMWare certainly isn’t the only one with those plans, since Ian Pratt from XenSource mentionned exactly the same during his Fosdem talk.

How do the OS vendors react to this new feature ? According to Lyman’s blog post, Red Hat claims

it is hardware vendors such as AMD and Intel that will create that standard virtualization layer and capability.

and

Novell indicates VMware may be taking somewhat of a risk, though, since OEMs like HP will look to upsell to their own software to create and manage VMs, which ESX 3i can’t do.

A hypervisor still needs management tools, so that the guest OS’s can be initiated, stopped and migrated. Applications aren’t running on hypervisors (yet); they need an operating system for IO, Memory Management and Network stacks at least for the foreseeable future.

On a longer term, we’ll have applications running natively on the hypervisor for sure. But today Operating System vendors are hoping for a uniform and better way to support different available and upcoming hypervisors and off course those lightweight systems will also benefit from these improvements.

If I were in the Operating System market I wouldn’t worry yet at this pointis , just as with all other features that hardware vendors are selling it is still ‘only’ a feature. When ordering a Dell you can choose between different CPU’s, different hard disks, different Operating Systems and most likely in the near future, different hypervisors as well.

Video: Demo from Tommy Armstrong, Product Marketing Manager Enterprise Desktop with VMware (VMworld Europe 2008)

March 4, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

The interview below is part of our Virtualization Video Series, a recurring theme we want to implement on Virtualization.com featuring interviews with key players from the industry, event reports, etc.

This interview was recorded at VMWorld Europe 2008 in Cannes, France, and features a demo by Tommy Armstrong, Product Marketing Manager Enterprise Desktop with VMware.

DivX HD 1280×720 3.5mbit/s: Play (pop-up)
WMV HD 1280×720 3.5mbit/s: Play (pop-up)

Flash versions: Blip (embedded below), Dailymotion, Myspace, Putfile, Revver, Sevenload, Vimeo, Youtube

Interviewer: Tarry Singh
Video blogger: Charbax