"This seems a strategic exit by VMWare to cede all desktop-hosted virtualization markets to competitors."
It's more boring than that. They've decided to offshore the jobs. The management probably believes these products are at market saturation anyway, so beyond attrition to container-oriented solutions like Docker, it's not likely Fusion or Workstation will actually go away or feel that different.
What's disappointing is that this team could have been everything Docker or Vagrant is - repeatable environments and workflow for developers.
There is zero chance the offshore team has the built-up institutional knowledge the original HostedUI team painstakingly accreted over decades to quickly integrate seamless container virtualization into the desktop-hosted Workstation and Fusion products. Not a knock on the offshore team. Even a brand-new domestic team would have zero chance. The container virtualization market is moving fast, so quick, effective integration is required.
That's unfortunate. I was looking forward to something like a VMWare Fusion/Workstation-powered session that starts off with a virtualized OS, auto-generates a container configuration file by watching everything you install and detecting what the installed app uses while you run it through its paces, creates and deploys a containerized app, perhaps onto your laptop and perhaps injecting directly into a cloud instance you point to (bonus points for integrated account support and API hooks for customizing the cloud deployment flow or injecting into your Chef/Puppet/etc. infrastructure)...then does it in reverse as well. Or "sync" a container to a virtualized OS version of the app, where you can deploy the full panoply of debugging tools to inspect what is happening on the container in ways that would be terribly inconvenient or not even possible on the container, like using log file analysis tools that wouldn't be on the container. It would take a performance hit, but for some the trade-off might be worth it. Or create an "instrumented" container, that intercepts failed operations like a library missing from the container, which then starts a sync with a virtualized OS version presumably with the missing library that completes the call. The possibilities I saw were endless.
Comments
"This seems a strategic exit by VMWare to cede all desktop-hosted virtualization markets to competitors."
It's more boring than that. They've decided to offshore the jobs. The management probably believes these products are at market saturation anyway, so beyond attrition to container-oriented solutions like Docker, it's not likely Fusion or Workstation will actually go away or feel that different.
What's disappointing is that this team could have been everything Docker or Vagrant is - repeatable environments and workflow for developers.
There is zero chance the offshore team has the built-up institutional knowledge the original HostedUI team painstakingly accreted over decades to quickly integrate seamless container virtualization into the desktop-hosted Workstation and Fusion products. Not a knock on the offshore team. Even a brand-new domestic team would have zero chance. The container virtualization market is moving fast, so quick, effective integration is required.
That's unfortunate. I was looking forward to something like a VMWare Fusion/Workstation-powered session that starts off with a virtualized OS, auto-generates a container configuration file by watching everything you install and detecting what the installed app uses while you run it through its paces, creates and deploys a containerized app, perhaps onto your laptop and perhaps injecting directly into a cloud instance you point to (bonus points for integrated account support and API hooks for customizing the cloud deployment flow or injecting into your Chef/Puppet/etc. infrastructure)...then does it in reverse as well. Or "sync" a container to a virtualized OS version of the app, where you can deploy the full panoply of debugging tools to inspect what is happening on the container in ways that would be terribly inconvenient or not even possible on the container, like using log file analysis tools that wouldn't be on the container. It would take a performance hit, but for some the trade-off might be worth it. Or create an "instrumented" container, that intercepts failed operations like a library missing from the container, which then starts a sync with a virtualized OS version presumably with the missing library that completes the call. The possibilities I saw were endless.