history
*Sigh* Another Win for Corporate America
by Miguel Diaz
Tue 16 Dec 2003 20:00:55
Well, it <a href="http://www.reuters.com/financeQuoteCompanyNewsArticle.jhtml?storyID=3996835&ric=emc&infotype=news&compname=EMC+CORP">seems</a> <a href="http://www.emc.com">EMC</a> has decided to go and purchase <a href="http://www.vmware.com">VMWare</a>. The move makes sense for EMC since they need to start playing in the virtualization realm in order to remain viable in the future and acquisitions are definitely more cost effective than in house development; especially when you don't know what the hell you're doing. But this one hurts because VMWare is such a wonderful product and EMC has a history of fucking things up.
Of course then there are the conspiracy theorists who have noted that the <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/apr03/04-28EMCpr.asp">partnership</a>
between EMC and <a href="http://www.microsoft.com">Micro$oft</a> has been growing recently and, being as VMWare is far and away the most comprehensive (and probably the only viable) virtualization solution for <a href="http://www.linux.org">Linux</a> on the desktop (either as host or guest OS), this could be a discreet attempt by Microsoft to undermine Linux's viability. Not that I really agree with them, but conspiracy theories are always fun.
FWIW, VMWare was scheduled to IPO in 2004 and I really think accepting this offer was something of a cowardly move on their executives' part because they would have done very well in the market with virtualization being such a hot topic these days. But you all know that saying about the "hand in the bush" or something; I guess it's hard for anyone to say no to $650M.
comments
anders pearson - Tue 16 Dec 2003 20:01:55
we <a href="http://www.ncl.cs.columbia.edu/publications/drdobbs2000.pdf">used VMWare</a> (pdf) pretty heavily in my Operating Systems class so we could do actual kernel development without worrying so much about accidently destroying a machine (mess up some filesystem code and you can quickly end up with something unrecoverable). it was amazingly solid and fast. it's probably also worth pointing out that microsoft recently <a href="http://www.arstechnica.com/archive/news/1045715739.html">purchased</a>, <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/virtualpc/">Virtual PC</a>, the other big player in the virtualization market. time to give <a href="http://bochs.sourceforge.net/">bochs</a> another try i guess.Miguel Diaz - Tue 16 Dec 2003 20:03:55
Yeah, I should have mentioned the Virtual PC acquisition too, but Virtual PC is lightyears behind VMWare in terms of usability and supported features. Plus there's no linux support; not even as a guest OS. Now that it's in M$'s hands I don't see linux support coming down the line either. <a href="http://www.plex86.org">Plex86</a> has also been looking like a very promising virtualization solution for linux, but the project's sloth-like approach to development is something of a turn-offanders pearson - Tue 16 Dec 2003 20:04:55
virtual PC used to run linux and BSD as guest OSes. they were even included in the configuration wizard. now i think they will still run, but are not actually 'supported' by microsoft (ie, we can't call the microsoft support line to ask about compiling a kernel). the fact that linux has been designed to be portable to multiple architectures means that it generally doesn't use a lot of the tricky advanced or undocumented features of most hardware and makes it inherently easier to run on a virtual machine. if a VM is thorough enough to emulate all the weird undocumented stuff that the Windows programmers with their close ties to intel knew about and used, it should run linux without a hitch (as long as the VM emulates common hardware for things like network cards and drives instead of just including a fake binary only driver for the guest OS to use). i'd forgotten about plex86 though. have to take a look at that one too.Miguel Diaz - Tue 16 Dec 2003 20:02:55
<a href="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/index.html">Xen</a> is another x86 virtualization solution which was brought to my attention today. A quick look at their performance numbers looks very promising. I haven't done too much digging as of yet though.