Can VMware boost profits by expanding from data centers to clouds?

Big cloudy startups build their infrastructure on custom – or, at the very least, cheap – iron, and they use open source software because they like to – and often need to – tweak the systems software to make their workloads hum. And that's a problem for VMware. And it's a big problem, one that makes the company irrelevant …

[Anonymous Coward]

Well they had better think about doing something different - you don't need to pay for a good hypervisor anymore. Hyper-V Server2012 is totally free and does most of what VMware does - and is more advanced in some areas like SDN. There also good open source options such as KVM and Xenserver, but they currently don't scale as well as Hyper-V and vSphere. Hyper-V has faster IO, but vSphere has memory page de-duplication.