It definitely makes sense for VMware to build and open source this, since their core business is selling the virtualization software this runs on top of (I assume).
Though I wonder how much of it is really VMware specific, or if it would be relatively easy to port to Xen, etc.
Edit: actually it appears it might be agnostic to the virtualization layer.
It seems that VMware's long term view is that virtualisation itself is a commodity (which it is, KVM and Xen are both "good enough" already), and it's going to be the management of IT resources which is financially lucrative in the future.
Their core business today is selling vSphere 4 management with ESXi as the hypervisor, I think they see their core business in 10 years as being the management layer for your entire IT infrastructure, wherever it runs.
ESXi is excellent, I think one of the best x86 kernels in existence. The management software is nowhere near on par with it; it is finicky Windows software that doesn't match the hypervisor's speed or reliability. The long-rumoured Linux version of the management platform still has not materialised.
The Linux version of vCenter is part of vSphere 5. There's also a cross platform version of the vSphere client, though it's written in Adobe Flex, so who knows how good that'll be..
Comments
It definitely makes sense for VMware to build and open source this, since their core business is selling the virtualization software this runs on top of (I assume).
Though I wonder how much of it is really VMware specific, or if it would be relatively easy to port to Xen, etc.
Edit: actually it appears it might be agnostic to the virtualization layer.
It seems that VMware's long term view is that virtualisation itself is a commodity (which it is, KVM and Xen are both "good enough" already), and it's going to be the management of IT resources which is financially lucrative in the future.
Their core business today is selling vSphere 4 management with ESXi as the hypervisor, I think they see their core business in 10 years as being the management layer for your entire IT infrastructure, wherever it runs.
I hate it when this happens.
ESXi is excellent, I think one of the best x86 kernels in existence. The management software is nowhere near on par with it; it is finicky Windows software that doesn't match the hypervisor's speed or reliability. The long-rumoured Linux version of the management platform still has not materialised.
The Linux version of vCenter is part of vSphere 5. There's also a cross platform version of the vSphere client, though it's written in Adobe Flex, so who knows how good that'll be..
It doesn't care about virtualization layer, runs on raw hardware too.