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VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

chrisdodds.net

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Re: VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

#11

Post by hodgesrm »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #10

It wasn't myopia. VMWare suffered from the same thing that other companies have gone through. They tried/are trying not to cannibalize their main source of revenue, and the world has moved on without them. CloudFoundry was their way of attempting to control the conversation, but it failed. They couldn't go from a lucrative private cloud revenue stream and then somehow convert it to a public cloud and expect to make t…

Can you cite sources for your assertion that bare metal will eliminate virtualization for on-prem operation? This does not square with the emergence of technologies like software defined networking.

Re: VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

#12

Post by tw04 »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #10

It wasn't myopia. VMWare suffered from the same thing that other companies have gone through. They tried/are trying not to cannibalize their main source of revenue, and the world has moved on without them. CloudFoundry was their way of attempting to control the conversation, but it failed. They couldn't go from a lucrative private cloud revenue stream and then somehow convert it to a public cloud and expect to make t…

I literally don't know of any large companies moving away from virtualization to bare metal. Where is that information coming from?

I know of some that are deploying some things back to "bare metal" if that's what you want to call containers, but even in those instances, it's a very, VERY small subset of the larger environment.

Re: VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

#13

Post by bsder »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #10

It wasn't myopia. VMWare suffered from the same thing that other companies have gone through. They tried/are trying not to cannibalize their main source of revenue, and the world has moved on without them. CloudFoundry was their way of attempting to control the conversation, but it failed. They couldn't go from a lucrative private cloud revenue stream and then somehow convert it to a public cloud and expect to make t…

> Many large companies with their own datacenters are running off of bare metal

What does "bare metal" actually mean? I don't think an embedded hardware guy has the same definition of bare metal as someone doing things in the cloud.

Re: VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

#15

Post by zurn »

Despite being critical this sounds like the author is still wearing quite VMware-colored glasses:

> Unfortunately, the world that they built is now eating them. Hypervisors became commodity, where "good enough" is an acceptable target. Hyper-V, Xen, KVM: they all became good enough for ecosystems to be built around them

In reality VMware (and VirtualBox) were leapfrogged by platform native hypervisors quality-wise, at least on Linux. Which is inevitable since there isn't really any way to ship robust proprietary binary-only kernel drivers of this complexity there.

(ESXi might be another story, but it's also not just a hypervisor, it's a whole stack of enterprisey proprietary infrastructure that you commit to instead of open systems, and hopping on that train is more a cultural/strategy/mindset choice than something based on technical hypervisor-vs-hypervisor benchmark)

Re: VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

#16

Post by simonebrunozzi »

tw04 wrote: post #12
pfarnsworth wrote: post #10

It wasn't myopia. VMWare suffered from the same thing that other companies have gone through. They tried/are trying not to cannibalize their main source of revenue, and the world has moved on without them. CloudFoundry was their way of attempting to control the conversation, but it failed. They couldn't go from a lucrative private cloud revenue stream and then somehow convert it to a public cloud and expect to make t…

I literally don't know of any large companies moving away from virtualization to bare metal. Where is that information coming from? I know of some that are deploying some things back to "bare metal" if that's what you want to call containers, but even in those instances, it's a very, VERY small subset of the larger environment.

It's invented. Source: my last 8 years at AWS and VMware.

Re: VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

#17

Post by trhway »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #10

It wasn't myopia. VMWare suffered from the same thing that other companies have gone through. They tried/are trying not to cannibalize their main source of revenue, and the world has moved on without them. CloudFoundry was their way of attempting to control the conversation, but it failed. They couldn't go from a lucrative private cloud revenue stream and then somehow convert it to a public cloud and expect to make t…

> They tried/are trying not to cannibalize their main source of revenue, and the world has moved on without them.

reminds me about Sun. There i learned that if you don't cannibalize your main source of revenue yourself, somebody else will do it anyway.

>They couldn't go from a lucrative private cloud revenue stream and then somehow convert it to a public cloud and expect to make the same amount of money.

it is the way of technology - from higher margin low volumes things grow/scale into lower margin higher volumes (with total money on the table only growing). To play that transition successfully a fat slow cow has to start moving faster and to become more lean.

>virtualization itself is dying

the original way - full VM like the VMWare Workstation - has become just one among several. Containers are here to stay for enterprises. Many enterprises aren't going to bother how you run the service which runs their containers as long as it runs and scales.

Re: VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

#18

Post by gaius »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #10

It wasn't myopia. VMWare suffered from the same thing that other companies have gone through. They tried/are trying not to cannibalize their main source of revenue, and the world has moved on without them. CloudFoundry was their way of attempting to control the conversation, but it failed. They couldn't go from a lucrative private cloud revenue stream and then somehow convert it to a public cloud and expect to make t…

Virtualisation isn't going anywhere. If it was mainframes would have already dumped it! In reality there is still alot of catching up to do!

Re: VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

#19

Post by detaro »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #10

It wasn't myopia. VMWare suffered from the same thing that other companies have gone through. They tried/are trying not to cannibalize their main source of revenue, and the world has moved on without them. CloudFoundry was their way of attempting to control the conversation, but it failed. They couldn't go from a lucrative private cloud revenue stream and then somehow convert it to a public cloud and expect to make t…

> Many large companies with their own datacenters are running off of bare metal, and this will be the trend going forward.

How many of those companies actually were the kind of company that otherwise would have bought VMWare products? Those that have the expertise to properly move off virtualization right now probably didn't bother with VMWare.

Re: VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

#20

Post by ghshephard »

I wasn't even aware that VMware had a cloud service, and I follow this stuff reasonably closely. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Rackspace, Linode, Joyent - these are all the companies that I think of when I think of "Cloud Services" - I would have bet money that VMware wasn't providing this as a service.
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