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VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

chrisdodds.net

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Re: VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

#21

Post by ghshephard »

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 work with a lot of enterprise companies, typically in the billion dollar market cap+ space. Exactly zero of them are thinking about leaving virtualization, and every one of them uses VMware as their platform.

Re: VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

#22

Post by jacquesm »

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…

You've been throwing around that 'virtualization is dying' line around quite a bit but in fact I see absolutely no evidence for this. The very largest companies never used virtualization in the first place and many others are actually moving from an architecture with a lot of dedicated servers to one where virtualization plays an important part.

Do you have any thoroughly researched numbers to back up this claim because I really don't see the evidence and I look at quite a few companies every year?

Re: VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

#23

Post by josteink »

zurn wrote: post #15

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, a…

> (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)

I may be wrong here, but I thought ESXi was the lightweight hypervisor-only product (which at the time was offered for free!), without all the enterprisey features or requirements.

Basically Microsoft Windows Hyper-V without the need to boot an OS of its own.

Re: VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

#24

Post by josteink »

This article here might be relevant to the discussion: "Technology Lab / Information Technology VMware Fusion, Workstation team culled in company restructure"

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/vmware...

So they've lost the cloud... They're firing the desktop guys. Where do they plan to go?

Re: VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

#25

Post by mrweasel »

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.

And on top that bare metal is ESXi. Not all companies run cloud services or large web-apps. Most run Exchange, database servers, SharePoint, CRM or ERP systems. For these companies virtualization is a way of saving rack space, while getting the benefits of redundancy, failover and the ability to quickly spin up a new server.

AWS is barely in the same business as vmware, even though Amazon would like to convince us otherwise. AWS is simply not an option for a ton of companies that don't want their data leaving their premises.

Vmware could have a nice niche business just making ESXi, but I doubt their management want to be a niche business.

Re: VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

#27

Post by jeletonskelly »

jacques_chester wrote: post #7

> They've already started that with containers. Docker orchestration platforms like Kubernetes and Mesos are still rough around the edges and there is room in the space for VMware to get in and leverage the benefit of their size and engineering bench. VMWare started doing this circa 2010-11. Eventually that project turned into the first version of Cloud Foundry. Edit: forgot my usual disclaimer that I work for Pivota…

Let's be honest though, CloudFoundry isn't a cloud. It's deployed onto a cloud provider like AWS and runs your apps on virtual machines inside an EC2 instance. It's useful if you want to abstract away your cloud provider, but it's not a cloud provider in and of itself.

Disclaimer: Currently working with a customer deploying to Cloud Foundry.

Re: VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

#28

Post by jeletonskelly »

latchkey wrote: post #3

The stumble was that CloudFoundry sucked until EMC bought Pivotal [Labs] and tasked them with cleaning up the mess. VMware isn't the cloud, Pivotal is.

To be clear, Cloud Foundry is not a cloud provider. It's an abstraction layer between your applications and an actual cloud provider.

Re: VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

#29

Post by op00to »

josteink wrote: post #23
zurn wrote: post #15

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, a…

> (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) I may be wrong here, but I thought ESXi was the lightweight hypervisor-only product (which at the time was…

Well, yes. It's a hypervisor only product. It also requires you to use VMware's tools to manage, and that closed architect poses road blocks to integrating it into a larger hybrid cloud environment. To basically do anything resembling what a real business would want, youd need to throw big bags of money at VMware to get more features. You can build all that in the open with KVM.
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