About owning the data center...
You say
"VMware wants control of our data centers. The whole stack, top to bottom. It wants to be the only vendor in your data center making any margin, and everyone else can be commoditized into interchangeable (and irrelevant) suppliers of steel and silicon.
Nutanix wants to make VMware (and all other hypervisor vendors) irrelevant and commoditized, and wants to be the one supplying the software that makes all the margins."
I wonder how that will be possible, for both of them, without owning an operating system? Without owning application services, like containers or Infrastructure-as-a-Service? Without owning Middleware? Without a PaaS Offering?
The true king in the data center is not the commoditized hypervisor, not the kool-aid hyper-converged storage solution - it's the application driving all the requirements. And to the application your fancy infrastructure silos become less and less important. A hypervisor is a commodity - everyone does it - 2/3 of the customers buy vSphere Standard, every KVM solution has more features than that today and it runs on Linux. Storage is becoming a commodity - it's a piece of software that runs on top of an standard x86 OS on top x86 hardware - no propietary box from a vendor who tries to lock you into hardware. Networking is becoming commodity - all I need are dumb L2 switches with fat backplanes - control plane, routing and firewalling is all done in software on top of standard x86 OS.
Your idea about quickly changing SDS vendors is a dream - in reality switching storage from propietary software vendor A to propietary appliance vendor B will involve a data migration. And data migrations are costly - they are disruptive, potentially and their always be trade-offs.
Your idea of just using someone else's KVM instead of VMware is a dream - in reality OS (and thus applications) are certified on Hypervisors. Nobody certifies on KVM as is - because the paravirtualized interfaces to the hardware matter to the software on top and differ from each implementation. KVM itself is not a full hypervisor solution - it's a kernel module that exposes Intel VT-x and AMD-v in a common API - there is qemu, libvirt, virtio and much more - you need to completely control and certify this stack. Try to find out if running Windows or RHEL/SLES/Ubuntu on top of Nutanix KVM is actually supported by the Microsoft or Red Hat / SuSE / Canonical of this world - you'd be surprised.
This shows that the real control lies with those vendors who control the OS. With everything running on top of standard x86 OS these vendors have the potential of delivering the next wave of innovation.
VMware is a mainly hypervisor with nice management and cloud desire - their potential on delivering the next wave of features is limited to what they can do with ESXi. Nutanix is a storage hypervisor - their target surface is even smaller. At some point VC cash will be burnt completely and when the marketing dust settles we will see what true advantages they are able to deliver despite a 6% increase of efficiency in what by tomorrows standards will be recalled as legacy environment.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
