Comments on: VMware to make server product free

Company expected to give away product enabling multiple OSes to run on one server, CNET News.com has learned.

[Mark_Wellins]

Brave move if true

It's a brave and smart move if true. Make the product a commodity, cementing itself as the standard virtualisation software, and make money on upsell and related revenue ooprtunities.

[postcardiff]

Just staying a bit ahead of the curve

Mark: as with all revenue opportunities that are of the razor+blade variety, it remains to be seen how much value-add there can be in providing higher-level services on top of a virtualization platform.

I confess I don't see much of a natural market for these guys once they have to compete with free.

[vmwizard]

"The more things change.....

... the more they stay the same." IBM used to give away the original, mainframe-based VM, then called VM/370, back in the mid-'70s.

It's called z/VM now, but it's still The Champion of the genre.

[Cash_Coleman]

Heh, VM/370

The only champion that can have z/VM as it's label is the price tag, and certainly not on the lower end of the scale. Not to mention the hardware, geesh! :)

[jowyang]

CTO of Hitachi Data Systems Says AOS and VMware can be pals

Interesting article, this reminds me of what my CTO wrote in his blog that "Application Optimized Storage for VMware makes Life easy"


http://blogs.hds.com/hu/2005/11/application_opt_1.html

[cllcomputers]

VMware's hints

First of all, i checked their website. "Find out what's coming soon
from VMware, Monday, February 6, 2006." If you look at the
HTML (alt) caption of the image (I found it when the image
stalled once), it says "Introducing VMware Server". Does this
mean they're renaming GSX Server to just plain "VMware Server"?

I also clicked on their product link for the GSX server, and
retyped the URL to "http://www.vmware.com/products/server/"
and it says forbidden, whereas a known nonexistent directory (i
tried /products/ser0ver/) shows up with a nice looking page
"Not Found". Sounds like they've already duded up the page, just
not yet released to the public. I have a feeling this link will work
once they announce it on Monday 6th.

[jowyang]

VMware player may not have really demonstrated the real use of virtualizati

Just saw this...check out what Tarry said on his blog...

" I still believe that the message via the VMware player may not have really demonstrated the real use of virtualization (It looked to me like the knoppix kind of linux distro, It's fun to run but I never get onto playing with it. I'd rather pick a regular distro and install it and use it fully!), anyways this product will get a lot of attention and eventually the idea is also to move to production with the VMware Server. " (
bottom of his post)
He includes some parody cartoons as well, demonstrating the convo within IT shops

http://tarrysingh.blogspot.com/2006/02/vmware-server-free-enterprize.html