How does VMware hurt EMC? A big enabler for VMware sales is vMotion for which you need some kind of shared storage therefore VMware is a way to encourage customers to deploy new "consolidated" storage solutions!

Hardly hurts EMC does it?

Whether it hurts EMC or not is dependant on whether people are buying large storage arrays, or re-using their current ones/building their own with OpenSauce operating systems.

I know I'm planning on setting up a couple of NASs running OpenFiler as it's free, and serves up reliable iSCSI and NFS shares on standard hardware - negating the need to pay stupendous amounts for what is, basically, glorified rack servers.

For me, a lot of the drivers for VMware solutions stem from consolidations and I have to say that a lot of this is arm in arm with consolidating storage.

Most customers I talk to internal storage with loads unused and inaccessible to other machines. The VMware solution lets me sell them a consolidate storage array with all the niceties of vMotion, DRS and HA.

Definitely doesn't hurt EMC per se, in my opinion (unless I'm selling a competitor like HP or IBM). Then it's not VMware hurting EMC, but their high prices.