Comments on: Will VMware give away VMotion and HA for free?

By: Flicka7

Flicka7 — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:52:35 +0000

[B]Fault Tolerance[/B]- the key to this discussion is the ability (which VMware now has and which M$ doesn’t yet have on the roadmap) to [I]absolutely[/I] provide continuous availability. If you haven’t seen a demo of FT, you should see it– amazing. Think “jerk the power cord out of the back of the server, and the VM just keeps right on going…”

As this “one up” game continues, M$ may have more $$$, but their own efforts are driving us all into the arms of “SAAS everything”. What vendor is the best qualified to take advantage of that?

The answer isn’t a vendor, it’s [B]open source[/B].

By: Advanced

Advanced — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:49:38 +0000

In the end MS is going to win this battle, they may not have the best technical features right now, but they eventually will, and at a very lower price, just ask Novell, Mac, Lotus, etc. etc. etc.

By: DeinosCloud

DeinosCloud — Wed, 20 May 2009 11:20:02 +0000

There is something to seriously consider, the amount of money invested in vSpeher 4… At some stage VMware has to earn money somewhere, it is their core business and cannot just give away for free!

MS on the opposite can do it easily. Look at the marketing battle, cause to win a battle better to fight on your ground, despite the fact current Hyper-V solution sux.

By: Jasonboche

Jasonboche — Wed, 20 May 2009 00:57:17 +0000

From an extremes standpoint, VMotion is much closer to a requirement than it is as a nice-to-have. For many shops who run VMs that provide continuous availability, especially to external or web facing customers, VMotion is a requirement. Or maybe alternatively you invest heavily in other technologies such as Big IP/F5, but even that doesn’t solve all of the problems that VMotion will. The first thing that ALWAYS comes to mind when a host w/ 50 VMs is in jeopardy or needs immediate maintenance is “can I VMotion?” The first question that the customers come back with when a host outage is required is “Are our VMs going to go down/do we need an outage?” Coordinating the outage of 50 servers in short order is very difficult. Not having VMotion is a change management nightmare. It doesn’t have to be. Not having VMotion is a choice.

By: Esiebert7625

Esiebert7625 — Tue, 19 May 2009 18:28:13 +0000

Good point, it would definitely require some changes. HA works without vCenter but you need vCenter to configure it. We’ll have to wait and see how VMware responds. This free back and forth stuff is good for customers but not for VMware or Microsoft. I’m sure VMware is getting tired of playing these games with Microsoft. VMware has a better product and their VMotion is smooth, easy and proven technology, same with HA., we’ll have to wait and see what Microsoft delivers.

By: Clinek

Clinek — Tue, 19 May 2009 18:16:55 +0000

Hi Eric,

Giving away HA/VMotion would require giving away vCenter (or a subset thereof). I think that’s been the holdup all along. It will be interesting to see if/how VMware addresses this.

KLC