When will VMware be bigger than EMC?

Don't get it

Maybe I'm dim, or slow. I don't yet "get" VMware, or virtualisation in general. It's a cool technology, the Player is neat, but where exactly is the huge business benefit that justifies the current VMware-related hype?

Virtualisation potentially saves the IT department some money on hardware and hardware-related costs (power and cooling, hardware-related people), and maybe a bit in terms of not needing dedicated hardware for different test environments (same hardware, differently virtualised).

Afaict virtualisation doesn't in general save legitimately-licenced organisations any money on software (not on purchasing, not on admin, not on people) or on general systems admin costs.

Are hardware-related costs still really such a big part of the enterprise IT department budget these days?

Storage, however, is a different story - demand in GB and GB/s continues to rise, although unfortunately for EMC price/GB keeps coming on down too.

I get it....

We use VMWare extensively in our organisation, the key is careful selection of what is to be virtualised.

VMWare player is a neat little toy, as is VMWare server. It is the ESX Server product that carries the advantage to the Enterprise IT.

Of course virtualisation will not save legitimately licensed organisations money on licenses. Nothing will if you want to remain legitimately licensed. Nor will it save money on systems admin, at the end of the day if you have the systems, regardless of format they still need administering.

We see significant hardware savings though, for example:

Looking at an enterprise server fleet, you will see that a lot of server hardware vastly exceeds the requirements of the application. This leads to a lot of unused capability in the data centre.

Lets say the average hardware cost of a 1u branded server to be $7k

For a good ESX host, you need a good robust multi core multi CPU lots of RAM server, lets say around $35k

We find that by careful selection of our virtualisation candidates, we can get one of these ESX hosts to run around 20 Virtual machines without getting too stressed. Essentially replacing 20 $7k boxes with 1 $35k box. Or in other words a hardware saving of $105k. Admittedly shared storage (Netapp or similar) and the VMWare licensing will eat in to that a little, but you still see an impressive saving.

Furthermore when you start to cluster your ESX hosts, you also add in a high availibility component. Store the virtual machines on a SAN, and they are accessible from any configured ESX host in the cluster. In the event of a hardware failure, or high resource utilisation, the VM's can be migrated to another host with a few seconds downtime.

Thats not even covering speed of deployment for new servers and the advantages for test and development environments.

The main point I am trying to make is that virtualisation does represent considerable cost savings for Enterprise IT - If it is deployed and utilised correctly. It is not the Swiss Army Knife that is going to fix everything, but like any other tool with correct applicaiton it can make life easier.

"not the Swiss Army Knife"

Thank you for that. I haven't done the stuff you have, but I'd worked out from first principles that those are the kind of places where virtualisation should save money. Which is great if you're in Enterprise IT as a provider, or as a VMware promoter, not quite so great if you're a mid-range box-shifter ;) And if you're looking at investing (as a shareholder) in VMware - looks to me like you need to be quick before the bubble bursts and/or the Linux court case arrives?

Re: "not the Swiss Army Knife"

Anonymous Vulture,

> quick before the bubble bursts

It is funny to see you predict the bubble of VMW bursting. It reminds me of the people who predicted the bubble of GOOG bursting.

Guess what? They were wrong, too.

> and/or the Linux court case arrives?

In case you haven't been following the news, the whole "VMware ESX Server is a derivative work of Linux" argument lost quite a bit of steam 2 weeks ago when VMware announced their embedded ESX Server product, which does the same thing as VMware ESX Server does, just sans Linux.

The Linux zealots could have had their favorite OS on all servers, but no, they decided it was much better to make false accusations against VMware instead. What a terrible move!