VMware's growth stalls – layoffs coming, but so are new hires VMware will lay off a little less than 7 per cent of its workforce and perform a bit of a restructuring in light of the fact that it expects some headwinds in the first half of 2013. Pat Gelsinger, the new sheriff in VMware town, wants to slim the company down and get it focused on its core server virtualization and cloud …
Another reason to stick with KVM. The amount of developers working on KVM is increasing....
Aside from the :-
-better performance
- the lack of any license costs (quite a major thing really)
- the flexibility (sorry vmware doesn't come close)
- the ability to take live snapshots, not like VMWARE live snapshots as mentioned here http://bulldogdata.com/2012/08/why-vmware-snapshots-are-both-good-and-really-really-bad/ - real full online disk snapshots (that can be used as a full backup)
i.e : http://www.linux-kvm.com/content/first-look-virtual-machine-online-disk-snapshots-coming-fedora-18
Ovirt 3.2 will be out in the matter of days which is comparable to the vcentre app.
Better performance? That's very subjective and not what I've experienced. I would say that the general consensus on the net is that KVM trails ESX but true the gap that KVM is behind isn't as wide as it used to be.
Yup KVM doesn't have a license cost
Flexibility? Again depends, I'd say ESX has given me more much more flexibility then KVM does, sure you've got access to a more feature full hypervisor-ish layer where you can run apps on the host system rather than only in the guest, but does that functionality there mean the guests have more functionality... I've found it to be lacking. As your own post mentions even now the owners of KVM (Redhat) still don't have an officially supported method of taking online snapshots like vmware; now if you want to run production on a product that you can't call support on, and was released less than a month ago have at it.
Ummm... your example of upcoming KVM snapshots look surprisingly like vmware implementation. A separate file containing disk changes pointing back to the original... which is the same method vmware has been doing for years. By copying vmware's implementation KVM will have the same issues as vmware. So welcome to the party you are a few years late but you eventually did show up.
I saw the scalability & performance specs for Hyper-V last week. If they hold up in the real world (and this is Microsoft so I wouldn't bet the house on it) then VMWare are screwed. Especially since I can see Microsoft pretty much giving it away as part of other sales.
Anyone had real-world deployment experience yet?
My impression is that there's more to it then just pricing. Up until now, MS didn't have the feature set to compete with VMware. This is the usual thing; MS overpromises and underdelivers. So, in the meantime, lots of environments have already settled on VMware. It's hard to get that installed base to move away to a new and unknown platform.
What you do see is hybrid solutions, consisting of multiple hypervisors. That's the way they will slowly gain some ground. As to the actual merits of Hyper-V. It seems to run nicely, but there's no feeling of control. If something goes wrong in VMware/Xen/KVM you can grab logfiles and check out what's happening (even "real-time" with tail). In Hyper-V you're more or less locked out of advanced configuration settings and logging. That is something I'd really miss when migrating.
"For all of 2012, VMware had $4.61bn in revenues, up 22.2 per cent, with software license sales up 13.4 per cent to $2.09bn, and services revenues up 30.8 per cent to $2.51bn. The company exited the year with $1.61bn in cash, another $3.02bn in short-term investments, and another $2.2bn in deferred revenues..."
Yes billion dollars in revenues; terrific growth figures... it's doom and gloom. What depresses me so about these sorts of bearish pieces is how disconnected they are with with wider economy. There's plenty of businesses around the globe who give their right hand just have 2-3% growth...
[Disclaimer: One VMware's new hires...]
Company ends year with $1.61 B in cash - it doesn't matter.
Company is still growing - it doesn't matter.
Company has $2.2 B in deferred revenue (future upside) - it doesn't matter.
What matters is simple: the CEO upside is tied to the stock-price. When growth is still healthy but showing signs of a slight slow-down, it means the high-ups are going to make less. The "remedy" is cutting costs, IOW layoffs.
This shows what's wrong with our form of capitalism. It is designed to increase polarization.
But complicated it isn't.
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