VMware goes on the offensive

Note: Reposted with the author’s permission from Burton Group’s Data Center Strategies blog.

If you haven’t seen Mike DiPetrillo’s latest blog, “VMware Patch Tuesday,” it’s definitely worth a few minutes of your time. Mike’s post contrasts patch management on the ESX hypervisor with that of competing platforms. I think the picture DiPetrillo paints is much darker than reality (at least with Windows hosts) being that a given Windows Server 2003 host will not require every available patch (many are service-specific) and since not all updates require a reboot. The patch reboot requirements will further diminish in Windows Server 2008 thanks to hot patching support.

That being said, Mike’s latest post is about much more than VMware’s patch management strategy. Instead, consider it the start of the VMware Offensive. In 2007, VMware for the most part smiled and waved at their competition. That’s not going to be the case in 2008. Citrix, Microsoft, Novell, SWsoft, Sun, Oracle, and Virtual Iron all have plans to chip away at VMware’s market share, and rather than ignoring their competitors, I expect VMware to be much more aggressive at highlighting what makes their approach to virtualization different from the competition.

Read the rest of this post at Burton Group’s Data Center Strategies blog.