We're at one of the more interesting periods for virtualization in 25 years of so.
That's about the time that Diane Greene, a co-founder of VMware and its CEO, was making the IT industry analyst rounds to talk up VMware's push into the x86 enterprise server virtualization space that didn't really exist at the time. Large Unix servers (and mainframes) had various ways to carve up the systems for different workloads. But x86 servers mostly didn't.
This was a problem, especially on servers running Microsoft Windows, because servers couldn't keep workloads from getting in each other's way. The result was that many servers were only running about 15% utilized or so.
It also just so happened that the bottom was about to drop out of IT spending with the popping of the dot-com bubble. The ability to make less hardware do more work was about to look very attractive. That virtualization didn't really demand a fundamentally different approach to applications and management than physical servers was attractive too.
VMware went through various ownership changes but, overall, it was a great success story.
Competition was limited
One consequence of this success is that potential competition, especially open source Xen and KVM, never got a huge amount of enterprise traction. VMware was just too entrenched.
VMware had also developed a rich set of tools (and a large partner ecosystem) to complement and enhance its core virtualization products. This made its offering even stickier. A potentially cheaper virtualization hypervisor was hard to make a case for in the enterprise.
Not everything was rosy. VMware never made especially great strides with cloud providers. It also arguably underinvested or underexecuted in application management relative to infrastructure management. Nonetheless VMware maintained a strong position.
Enter containers
However, about a decade ago, containers and container orchestration (especially in the guise of Kubernetes) were becoming important.
Containers weren't necessarily attractive to everyone. Especially at first, they didn't partition workloads as completely as virtualization did. Furthermore, taking advantage of containers and Kubernetes to their fullest benefited from a variety of new application architectural patterns such as microservices.
VMware recognized this shift but their virtualization cash cow was something of an anchor and they never had a strong container story. In late 2023, Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware. Broad changes in pricing and licensing are underway.
Changes in pricing and shifts in the technology landscape can easily lead to changes in default buyer behavior.
A new dynamic
I've been watching how this plays out in the context of Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat's Kubernetes-based application development platform. OpenShift Virtualization 4.18 was just released.
OpenShift Virtualization uses an upstream open source project called KubeVirt. OpenShift Virtualization provides a unified environment for VMs, containers and serverless technologies for maximum flexibility.
This is important because past studies such as the Konveyor community's State of Application Modernization Report 2024 have shown that organizations take a variety of approaches to modernizing different parts of their application portfolios. They may rewrite as cloud-native, just lift and shift, or other approaches in between.
As a result, there's often a benefit to a unified platform that can accommodate a number of different styles of workloads at different points in an organization's application modernization journey. I think the industry has sometimes been too quick to try to push everyone to the latest technology hotness. It's fine to advocate for new approaches. But you also have to meet people where they are.
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