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VMware makes a strange move

Every day the battle in the virtualization market is getting more exciting. 

Thursday (11 December 2008) VMware released update 3 for it’s free hypervisor: ESXi. No big deal right?But apparently they changed something in this update that could really change the way VMware virtual infrastructures will look like in a few months / years. 

In the last 12 months we have seen a change of focus within the virtualization battle. The hypervisor has really become a commodity and is free (ESXi & Hyper-V). It’s all about managing the virtual infrastructure now. Microsoft released their System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) for this. What makes VMM great is that it can manage different virtual infrastructures at only a fraction of the cost of other managing tools. VMM can also manage a VMware VI. The downside of this is the fact that although you can manage a VMware environment you will also need VirtualCenter. VMM needs VirtualCenter to pass the command to the ESX servers. So you would need double the licenses for management software for your VI. Smart move from VMware, because they are actually making their money with the extra features that VirtualCenter brings.

But with update 3 of ESXi, VMware has decided to fully unlock all API’s. This means that any virtual machine managing tool can perform Vmotion activities on a VMware VI. This really diminishes the need for VirtualCenter. VMM would be able to perform the most important management tasks. For medium sized environments this would definitly be enough. You will have a stable hypervisor for free (ESXi) and the management tools for nearly nothing (VMM). 

I’m sure VMware has thought about this as well and is convinced about the business case for VirtualCenter. I hope they or anyone else on this blog will share this soon with me.

Update:

Well this explains everything. 

 ”Turns out that while fixing an API bug the API set got partially unlocked. Yes, you read that right, VMware didn’t mean to unlock the API set - at least not wholly and not yet. So, if you went out and started madly coding some killer VirtualCenter Client replacement then hold off because I’m told the U4 update will lock things back down again”

Read all about it, on this blog: http://www.mikedipetrillo.com/mikedvirtualization/2008/12/update-vmware-rcli-now-writes-to-esxi-free-hosts.html

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