Making sense of a VMware acquisition of Red Hat
OStatic raises an interesting question around the swirling rumors of VMware's interest in acquiring Red Hat: would an acquisition make sense?
OStatic's Sam Dean suggests the answer is a qualified yes, but I can't see it. He points to commoditization of virtualization at the hands of the operating system vendors as a key reason VMware would seek safety in Red Hat, but I would think this trend cuts the other way. Red Hat (and Novell) likely see virtualization's commoditization as a reason to push the knife deeper into VMware. Being acquired by an important but commoditized feature of their operating systems doesn't sound appealing to me...
Instead, I'd see more promise in VMware "moving up the stack" in the same way that infrastructure vendors have always done to evade commoditization. It's the strategy that Oracle has been following, along with Red Hat, IBM, and others.
Are there particular applications that lend themselves well to virtualization? If so, that's where I'd be looking for VMware's next acquisition. Or maybe a platform-as-a-service vendor to help create virtualized applications?
Or perhaps a much easier to use/deploy mechanism for applications? ThinApp promises to be such, but my own experience with rolling a VMware appliance is that it's not a particularly easy process.
I'm clearly grasping at straws here, but I don't think VMware needs to buy an operating system. Any thoughts on what VMware should be doing with its still-sizable bank account?
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
On the other hand, VMware could take commanding interest in shaping Red Hat's future in virtualization around ESX compatibility and Xen and KVM. This would provide the market potentially with a "second source" provider of a hypervisor and an OS designed run on both ESX with openvmtools and VMI . Second source virtualization could come from Xen or KVM investments. VMware has been on the sidelines with virtualization in the Linux kernel, aquiring Red Hat would increase their level of participation.
- by The_Decider August 21, 2008 5:38 PM PDT
- I think it is a pretty good match and could be a response to what Novell did with Xen in OpenSuSE 11.0. Installing xen, and configuring VM's is now a few clicks and a reboot (although the kernel used for this doesn't play nice with nvidia's video driver, which isn't a big deal if you want to virtualize servers on top of an OS, but it is annoying to me in my office grr....) and you are up an running.
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(5 Comments)"Are there particular applications that lend themselves well to virtualization?"
Yes, and RedHat is often the vendor of choice for these applications to run on.