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ShareVMware: New King Of The Data Center?
Posted by
Andrew Conry Murray
October 13, 2007
Usually the bully kicks sand in the little guy's face, but VMware is switching that story. In a speech at LinuxWorld in August, VMware chief scientist Mendel Rosenblum talked up application-specific operating systems provided by ISVs that would run on a hypervisor--no general-purpose OS needed. You can bet Microsoft took notice.
For IT pros, it was smack talk worthy of Terrell Owens. Rosenblum has cause to be cocky. VMware's dazzling partial initial public offering has filled its coffers with almost a billion dollars, and its hypervisor market share looks insurmountable. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Windows Server 2008, which has yet to take the field, won't include a hypervisor until six months after the server launches.
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Whither The OS Though still a nascent technology, hypervisors are poised to supplant the classic operating system as the software layer closest to the hardware and management infrastructure. VMware believes that purpose-built operating systems fitted to apps will further diminish the value of the general-purpose OS. BEA and virtual appliance vendors are providing the first concrete examples of these micro-operating systems. The result is better resource utilization, a more tightly integrated software stack, and a major threat to Microsoft. |
Gates' team has played this game before--a nimble competitor with innovative technology eventually gets crushed by the slow but inexorable force of Microsoft's market dominance (abetted by sometimes unsavory business practices). But this time, the ending might be different because virtualization fundamentally changes the rules. Microsoft's tried-and-true strategy may not work, in part because what gives Microsoft its strength--the operating system--is losing its clout.
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