VMware

[Bobb]

Hi everyone, In another thread "VMware" was mentioned. I came across this article about them and thought this might be of some interest to some of you. No, I don't have any dough in the company. Take care, BOBB


VMware seeks to build on IPO buzz
9/11/2007, 7:33 p.m. ET
By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
The Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Fresh off this year's hottest debut on Wall Street, trendsetting software maker VMware Inc. is hosting nearly 11,000 people clamoring to learn more about a computing twist that is turning into high-tech's next big jackpot.

VMware's three-day conference, which began Tuesday in San Francisco, provides the once-obscure company with an opportunity to build on the buzz created by its lucrative initial public offering of stock less than a month ago.

"This is their moment in the sun," said Erik Josowitz, vice president of product strategy of Surgient Inc., one of many software makers hoping to ride VMWare's coattails. "They have every reason to be having a very big party right now."

VMware's software steers a process known as "virtualization," which allows computers to harness more of their unused power and run more applications at once without a hiccup. More than 20,000 companies already use VMware's software.

Investors are flocking to VMware too. The Palo Alto-based company's initial public offering raised $1.1 billion, the most a high-tech company has pulled in since Internet search leader Google Inc. went public three years ago.

VMware's stockholders have enjoyed the ride as shares have nearly tripled from their initial price of $29. The stock hit a new high of $82.75 Tuesday before finishing the regular trading session at $76.65.

With a market value approaching $30 billion, VMware already is worth more than all but three publicly traded software makers — Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and SAP AG.

In January 2004, VMware was valued at $602 million — the price EMC Corp. paid for it then. Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC still holds an 87 percent stake in the company.

This week's conference, dubbed "VMworld," is another reminder of the company's rapid ascent. VMware's first customer conference in 2004 drew fewer than 1,500 people.

The central idea of WMware's visualization software is to turn a single computer into the equivalent of multiple machines, enabling companies to save money on the hardware and electricity needed to keep their data centers humming. Virtualization also is supposed to make it easier to recover information after computers crash.

Those benefits are expected to spur one of corporate America's biggest spending sprees on technology since the dot-com boom ended in 2000. Research firm IDC estimates spending on virtualization software and supporting services will swell to more than $15 billion worldwide in 2011, up from $6.5 billion last year. Billions more will likely be spent on compatible equipment.

"Virtualization has reached a tipping point," Hector Ruiz, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s chief executive officer, said during a speech at the conference Tuesday.

Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett agreed. "We are about to see a big shift in information technology. It's like the light bulbs are going off in everyone's heads all at once."

Computer chip maker AMD is angling for a piece of the action, along with a long list of technology bellwethers, including Intel Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp., Dell Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc.

None appears better positioned than VMware, which was founded in 1998 by a group that included entrepreneur Diane Greene and her husband, Stanford University associate professor Mendel Rosenblum. Greene remains VMware's chief executive and Rosenblum serves as chief technical officer.

Analysts predict VMware will earn $235 million on revenue of $1.27 billion this year, up from a profit of $86 million on revenue of $704 million last year. The company's growth prompted both Intel and Cisco to buy small stakes in VMware before the IPO.

"Diane Greene had a great vision. She has proven that virtualization is bigger than anyone ever thought it could be," said Vinod Khosla, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc. He is investing in a startup, Xsigo, that specializes in virtualization hardware.

Greene, 52, told Tuesday's audience she sometimes finds it hard to believe how quickly virtualization is gathering steam.

"A year ago, we were talking about virtualization becoming mainstream," she said. "Now, we are talking about a virtualization industry."

VMware's future looks so bright that some analysts believe the company someday could become as essential to the computing world as Microsoft is.

That's because virtualization relies on a "hypervisor" that resides below operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows and Linux, and makes key decisions on how computers run. VMware kicked off this week's conference by announcing deals to embed its latest hypervisor on the servers commonly deployed in data centers.

Leery of VMware's success, Microsoft plans to enter the virtualization market next year with its own software, currently code-named "Viridian."

Other rivals like Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based Citrix Systems Inc. could slow VMware's growth. Citrix signaled its intention to become a bigger player in the field last month with a $500 million deal to buy virtualization specialist XenSource Inc.

But VMware has a huge head start with 17 virtualization products already on the market and 22 patents that won't start expiring until 2018.

What's more, VMware's high-flying stock gives it the financial clout to expand through acquisitions. Toward that end, VMware disclosed Tuesday that it has bought another virtualization software specialist, Switzerland-based Dunes Technologies, for an undisclosed sum.

VMware "is leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else, but I think we are a long way from game over," Josowitz said. "This thing is just getting started."

Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
© 2007 Michigan Live. All Rights Reserved.

[NikFu S.]

Forgot something? ?

[Bobb]

Thanks for the reminder Nick. Take care, BOBB

[NikFu S.]

Hmm, I don't see how anything is possible with "virtual infrastructure" that is not currently possible without it. Virtual machines and emulation are hardly a new idea, and even with virtual machinization it's not going to increase the ability of the hardware to multi-task.
Once the other companies release their own versions of the hypervisor, VMware's stock is going to plummet. I don't see any use for this at all outside of large server-side businesses and if anything it will bog down a system that uses more than 30% of it's resource at any given time.

You can see on their own site, on their own benchmarks, increased performance hits it's peak early, and begins to fall almost as rapidly not unlike multicore processors.

http://www.vmware.com/overview/perfo...enchmarks.html

I suppose if you run a VM you can run a secure "whatever" where ever fairly risk and worry free, but it seems pointless to me.

[mohrds]

Originally Posted by NikFu S.

Hmm, I don't see how anything is possible with "virtual infrastructure" that is not currently possible without it. Virtual machines and emulation are hardly a new idea, and even with virtual machinization it's not going to increase the ability of the hardware to multi-task.
Once the other companies release their own versions of the hypervisor, VMware's stock is going to plummet. I don't see any use for this at all outside of large server-side businesses and if anything it will bog down a system that uses more than 30% of it's resource at any given time.

You can see on their own site, on their own benchmarks, increased performance hits it's peak early, and begins to fall almost as rapidly not unlike multicore processors.

http://www.vmware.com/overview/perfo...enchmarks.html

I suppose if you run a VM you can run a secure "whatever" where ever fairly risk and worry free, but it seems pointless to me.

Basic virtualization is nothing new, but VMWare has taken the idea and built some interesting things on it. You can have a farm of VMWare servers and they can share virtual machines based on resource demand. Imagine having a server that can spread its processing load among multiple servers during a burst, then scale back down to one when demand slows. You can pull one physical server out for maintainence and all of the virtual servers stay live.

For building server/client systems it is a dream. I always build new servers in a VMWare session first, with many snapshots so if something I install breaks something else, I simply revert to a previous snapshot and restart the installation of the guilty product to debug.

[thumper_svx]

Originally Posted by NikFu S.

Hmm, I don't see how anything is possible with "virtual infrastructure" that is not currently possible without it. Virtual machines and emulation are hardly a new idea, and even with virtual machinization it's not going to increase the ability of the hardware to multi-task.
Once the other companies release their own versions of the hypervisor, VMware's stock is going to plummet. I don't see any use for this at all outside of large server-side businesses and if anything it will bog down a system that uses more than 30% of it's resource at any given time.

You can see on their own site, on their own benchmarks, increased performance hits it's peak early, and begins to fall almost as rapidly not unlike multicore processors.

http://www.vmware.com/overview/perfo...enchmarks.html

I suppose if you run a VM you can run a secure "whatever" where ever fairly risk and worry free, but it seems pointless to me.

Disclaimer: I do VMWare for a living and am a VCP (VMware Certified Professional). As a result, I DO have a vested interest in the success of the company and product... but I'm also Citrix Certified and working with Xen a lot... so take that for what it's worth, too...

Contrary to your comment, virtualization DOES increase the ability for a given physical box to multitask. Particularly when dealing with Windows systems, the ability for the OS to arbitrate tasks falls apart as you scale up (number of applications). That's why most people actually end up scaling out; that is adding additional systems instead of having multiple processors and so forth. Typically, each server in an environment only runs one or two major tasks, with the rest of the system committed to running the rest (authentication, disk subsystems and so forth).

Now, as you scale out like this, the problem becomes one of load. A typical Windows server is less than 8% utilized (and this is from my own studies, not VMWare's). This means that for an average server-based application you're wasting 92% of the server's computing power. Note here that I take computing power to be a combination of all factors; memory, CPU and I/O utilization... not just CPU utilization. For a company paying $10,000 for a server, that's a loss of $9,200 per server in the datacenter.

VMWare allows you to stack 6 or 7 of these systems on top of one another, leaving some overhead for growth in one physical box. It maintains all the advantages of outward scaling (application isolation, multitasking and so forth) while getting rid of the down side (wasted computing cycles).

Now the reality is obviously a LOT more complex than this. If it were this simple then we wouldn't need people like me. However, as a rough guide this is good enough.

I build systems that run in an high-availability backbone, each physical node running (normally) 15-20 guest machines... mostly Windows but some Linux and at least one Solaris box that I know of. So, across our current farm with 160 Virtual Guests, we have nominally 10 big beefy servers instead of 160 2U boxes in our racks (our standard stand-alone server used to be a DL385).

Now, we actually run our VMWare on highly powered IBM blades connected to a SAN. In fact, with technologies like VMotion (look it up!) we can actually take down a server for patching or hardware replacement without taking down ANY of the hosts on the server itself. Put it in maintenance mode, move them to other nodes and we've just moved a client-accessed server to another physical server without downtime.

I'm sure you can see the value in this to corporations. It's huge, and I paid for my own VCP exam because I believe in the future of virtualization. Maybe I sound like a zealot... but it REALLY is cool tech.

MSG me if you want ot discuss further...

[Noir]

Noir likes VMware.

that is all.

[NikFu S.]

Originally Posted by thumper_svx

Now, as you scale out like this, the problem becomes one of load. A typical Windows server is less than 8% utilized (and this is from my own studies, not VMWare's). This means that for an average server-based application you're wasting 92% of the server's computing power. Note here that I take computing power to be a combination of all factors; memory, CPU and I/O utilization... not just CPU utilization. For a company paying $10,000 for a server, that's a loss of $9,200 per server in the datacenter.

VMWare allows you to stack 6 or 7 of these systems on top of one another, leaving some overhead for growth in one physical box. It maintains all the advantages of outward scaling (application isolation, multitasking and so forth) while getting rid of the down side (wasted computing cycles).

I've narrowed what would be a kinda long post down to one question.

How does it not also waste computer cycles?

--
While thinking about it I drew myself a little diagram to help understand.
If you can make sense of it and alter it to better represent what VMware does that would be helpful since the sites just use a lot of e-jargon without really demonstrating any actual application.

I was also under the impression this was new but you guys are all using it.