According to reliable sources VMware is going to announce the release of their hypervisor for free. ESX 3i is the embedded hypervisor that allows for OEMs to sell a ESX-ready-to-install-in-your-datacenter server to customers. ESX 3i was announced last year at VMworld, and since then, people have been anxiously awaiting the ability to buy these quick to deploy solutions.
It makes sense for VMware to do this today. Microsoft’s Hyper-V is no additional cost over the purchase of the OS. It’s bundled. The Xen hypervisor is freely available after you’ve purchased support for Redhat, suse, or Citrix’s XenServer. It’s also Freely available for whatever platform you want to deploy it on anyway. Not to mention the host of other technologies to allow for virtualization today.
The hypervisor is a commodity, it’s the new ketchup of the computing world, you can eat without it, but it just doesn’t taste as good. If the competition is giving it away, it only makes sense for you to do so as well. It wasn’t that long ago that I touched on the idea that OS vendors that don’t offer virtualization are going to cease to exist, Mike was shocked and dismayed that Canonical didn’t develop their own hypervisor (as if that was a bad thing) and instead decided to throw weight behind an already established product.
A lot of factors went into this decision I’m sure, but the end result for us, VMware’s customer, is the ability to deploy servers more rapidly in our datacenters, while saving some coin.
The future of the market is going to be around services, and with VMware’s purchase of B-Hive earlier in the quarter, you can see that they are focusing on this as well.