Brian Madden: vmware onDemand Streaming vs Ardence

Brian wrote this great article  about booting a VM or physical machine remotely.  There have also been blog posts about how vmware showed creation of 100s of differential disks for different workstations in matter of minutes.

While these demonstrations are powerful, one has to consider what markets they are applicable today and what are the other pieces which have to come together for them to be practical in the real world. There are some examples: Transient Use: public libraries, kiosks, patient rooms; Enterprise User Desktops; Enterprise Call Centers

Transient use desktops today use some re-imaging technology which re-images them every night.  These are easy to virtualize, but the additional benefit may be small. Enterprise call centers use thin/thick clients today and are an interface to some back end application.

For enterprise desktops where the user to desktop mapping is one on one (user feels this is his or her machine) are unlikely to be provisioned from scratch. Also the tools used today to provision and configure the operating systems need to work on these images. For example, HP’s radia is used in several companies to provision desktops and to distribute patches to them, keep gold disks etc.  There are several aspects of the virtualization technology which are “cool” and enable new things, but how to integrate them into today’s management fabric is an open question.

Smart Positioning by Tripwire

I had a chance to sit through Tripwire’s demo at the recent BMC User World conference.  Tripwire has had the capability to create a baseline for the files on a machine and then compare the current state of this machine to the baseline.

They have re-positioned the baseline to mean a “compliance baseline”. Where now a baseline could encompass files, or policies and then you can check deviation from this baseline. This is really good positioning and will help the customers with easy technology.

Vendors like Bladelogic also provide similar capability and functionality.

VMWare: how certain is the future?

This article analyses how VMWare prices its products versus where its core IP is. One of the insights which emerge is that the pricing and core-ip are not in the same components. Essentially because of hte commoditization of the hypervisor the company has to re-invent itself and add value into the management layer.

 

Virtual Infrastructure from VMWare has three major components:

1. Virtualization Platform
2. Virtual Infrastructure
3. Management & Automation

The Virtualization platform is roughly equal to the Hypervisor (what are the differences)? This is where a lot of the initial IP of VmWare belonged. Today VmWare’s advantage here remains performance, which will decrease more rapidly as hardware support for virtualization becomes more ubiquitous. VmWare sets the price for the hypervisor at $500 per server.

The next layer (virtual infrastructure) is what makes the ESX into a platform for the Enterprise. The key ability here is to view all the ESX servers as a single infrastructure and simplify operations considerably. This is where some of the new IP is being generated. Is there enough defensible IP here? Has this feature set been developed over and over again by OS vendors?

From a pricing perspective, VmWare is banking on a large chunk of revenue coming from this layer. See the table below for pricing to be introduced later in the year. This is a weakness in the VmWare strategy. 5000 dollars for these features is excessive. The only way they can charge this much is if there was a lock on the interface between the ESX layers and the features provided in the Virtual Infrastructure layer. Can VMWare prevent third party plays to provide this layer? Would lower price alternatives works its way through the eco-system.

The third layer Virtual Center Server is required in order to use features of the virtual infrastructure layer. There is almost no IP here and this layer can be easily replicated. It is essentially a UI and a database based application. It has a base price of about 15,000. There is some per server pricing also (but I can’t find it on the VmWare web site). This functionliaty should become free over the next year or so.

 

Is VMWare’s lock on its future as certain as people think it is? Isn’t the price dis-connected from where the IP is? Should it be priced as a management company? What do you think?