Is VMware becoming the bad guy?

It may be clear to you that we at VMGuru.nl are huge VMware fans but when we claim to inform you about all the virtualization related news, we owe it to you to bring positive as well as negative news about VMware, Microsoft, Citrix (2) or any other vendor for that matter.

Lately VMware has been in the news in a not so positive manner. First there was a change in the VMworld policy which according to VMware was to prevent competitors from trashing VMware like Microsoft did at VMworld 2008. Second there was the news that Veeam had to discontinue the support for ESXi Free in Veeam Backup and Replication in order to comply with VMware’s updated licensing policy.

Gabrie van Zanten from Gabes Virtual World wrote a great article on the subject which you should definitely check out.
He is awaiting official response from VMware so check out the article here and come back to check the VMware response.

Personally i hope he is wrong and Paul Maritz left his ‘bully-my-competitor-box-of-tricks‘ at Microsoft. But maybe this is the way the game needs to be played in the current economic situation with the upcoming competition.

Tags: VMware

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 15:10 and is filed under VMware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

About Erik Scholten

Erik Scholten is the founder of VMGuru.nl and works for Imtech ICT as a Solution Architect creating the most ingenious virtual infrastructures. He has over 14 years experience as a system engineer and consultant and now he specializes in virtualization. His current job includes selling, presenting, designing and developing virtual infrastructures for some major companies in the Netherlands. In 2009, 2010 and 2011 VMware awarded him the vExpert award for his virtualization community efforts.

http://www.VeeamMeUp.com/ vmdoug

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http://www.VeeamMeUp.com vmdoug

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http://blog.cretec-web.com/ Clint Eschberger

I think they are unfortunately following a common path. When VMware first came around the idea of a hypervisor in the data center was pretty far fetched. It was in VMwares best interest to promote virtualzation to help themselves grow. Without it catching on they were dead in the water. Even when it started to catch on in production environments, it still was not yet mainstream so they kept supporting virtualization as a whole even though it meant at the time that competitors alike would gain from this as well.

However now as VMware sits at the top of the hypervisor world, they want to use the power that they have gained to thwart others like Hyper-V, Xen, etc.

I do think they are starting to take that bully or bad guy persona now. I too have been a big fan of VMware and enjoy talking about it with others. However they are starting to look a little Microsoft-esque.
http://blog.cretec-web.com Clint Eschberger

I think they are unfortunately following a common path. When VMware first came around the idea of a hypervisor in the data center was pretty far fetched. It was in VMwares best interest to promote virtualzation to help themselves grow. Without it catching on they were dead in the water. Even when it started to catch on in production environments, it still was not yet mainstream so they kept supporting virtualization as a whole even though it meant at the time that competitors alike would gain from this as well.

However now as VMware sits at the top of the hypervisor world, they want to use the power that they have gained to thwart others like Hyper-V, Xen, etc.

I do think they are starting to take that bully or bad guy persona now. I too have been a big fan of VMware and enjoy talking about it with others. However they are starting to look a little Microsoft-esque.
Rob A.

What do you mean BECOMING the bad guy? VSphere is a price increase and now this. VMware is way past Microsoft and becoming as bad as Oracle. VMware pricing is draconian (like Oracle), their dropping support for ESXi (how much longer do you expect Oracle to support MySQL) and how much longer before ESXi is just gone?
Rob A.

What do you mean BECOMING the bad guy? VSphere is a price increase and now this. VMware is way past Microsoft and becoming as bad as Oracle. VMware pricing is draconian (like Oracle), their dropping support for ESXi (how much longer do you expect Oracle to support MySQL) and how much longer before ESXi is just gone?
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http://www.vmguru.nl Anne Jan Elsinga

The support they dropped is just for the free edition. To be honest this doesn’t surprise me at all. A lot of (small) companies use the free ESXi in production environments. VMware also wants to make money in SMB segment. You’re still allowed to use the free ESXi in your production environment, but you have to pay for support. This isn’t strange I think. The people that are helping you on the telephone or that are troubleshooting your problems still have to be paid. It looks a bit like have no warranty on a product and still you do want the company to replace it without you having to pay for it.

I don’t think ESXi will be dropped at all. I think (hope) that ESXi will be the only version available I think there will be a migration from ESX to ESXi. You already see this happening with vMA, the management virtual appliance.

I’m not sure if I agree with you that they passed Microsoft. To be honest, the action they took is a logical one. All companies want to make money, and VMware isn’t an exception.
http://www.vmguru.nl MeAgain

The support they dropped is just for the free edition. To be honest this doesn’t surprise me at all. A lot of (small) companies use the free ESXi in production environments. VMware also wants to make money in SMB segment. You’re still allowed to use the free ESXi in your production environment, but you have to pay for support. This isn’t strange I think. The people that are helping you on the telephone or that are troubleshooting your problems still have to be paid. It looks a bit like have no warranty on a product and still you do want the company to replace it without you having to pay for it.

I don’t think ESXi will be dropped at all. I think (hope) that ESXi will be the only version available I think there will be a migration from ESX to ESXi. You already see this happening with vMA, the management virtual appliance.

I’m not sure if I agree with you that they passed Microsoft. To be honest, the action they took is a logical one. All companies want to make money, and VMware isn’t an exception.
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