Although VMware, unquestionably, won the hypervisor wars that emerged a number of years ago, the battleground has, however, now shifted.
So says Jon Reeve, VP of product at StackEngine, who notes that some key traditional VMware competitors such as Microsoft have made more significant and earlier strides to embrace public cloud computing, and have more diversified revenue streams.
VMware's strategy has to been to embrace potential challenges to its core hypervisor business - Openstack and Containers - by integrating its core platforms with these new technologies, thereby attempting to extend the lifetime of its core business.
At the same time, Reeve notes, VMware is placing its bets behind three initiatives: management, software defined infrastructure, and public cloud. "The problem with the first two is that they are both largely dependent on VMware's existing installed base remaining strong for potential upsell capabilities, and its public cloud is competing with entrenched and further developed clouds.
"Since VMware is so dependent on its core hypervisor business, it is essentially facing its own 'innovator's dilemma' as technologies such as cloud and containers continue to disrupt and threaten its core business," he says.
VMware solution set
Ian Jansen van Rensburg, senior systems engineering manager of VMware sub-Saharan Africa, says the hypervisor is still the core component of VMware's solution set. Innovation and further enhancements to the hypervisor have not stopped and VMware is still making things better and faster, he adds.
He also brags that VMware was also recently placed in the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner's 2015 Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualisation Infrastructure for the sixth year in a row, "highlighting just how we continue to lead in this market".
Reeve concurs, saying VMware continues to generate a significant amount of revenue from licensing its underlying ESX hypervisor, which is the predominant hypervisor used for virtualisation in the majority of enterprises.
However, he believes that to remain relevant, VMware has to prepare for a future of competing technology stacks, where its hypervisor may not continue to be the driver of its core business.
"This will require a significant shift where it (VMware) must be prepared sell its management capabilities, software-defined infrastructure and cloud products on top of competing technology stacks," Reeve says.
Key challenges
According to Reeve, VMware is facing a few key challenges. The first is the continued move by the majority of enterprises to embrace (public) cloud computing, he notes, pointing out that VMware was probably two to three years late in launching its own public cloud offering, which continues to lag against primary competitors such as Amazon Web Services, which has significant mindshare and market traction at this point.
He adds that Openstack is another challenge to VMware's core hypervisor revenue base, although it has been slow to gain traction and is still considered by many as somewhat of a "science experiment", which has played in VMware's favour.
"Finally, the emergence of containers from other companies presents another threat to VMware's core hypervisor platform - containers can be run and managed on a barebone Linux distribution on bare metal servers, bypassing the need for any hypervisor layer at all.
"Containers are also viewed as a means to true application portability with the ability to define and run applications that are not locked-in into any particular cloud provider," Reeve says.
Nonetheless, Jansen van Rensburg says the rapid evolution of virtualisation technologies as well as software-defined networking and storage presents a huge opportunity to resellers that will eclipse the one they have seen to date.
"If we look back, the virtualisation story is one of unwavering success. Today it is widely accepted as an essential element of any data centre or storage solution, this success story is now entering its next phase, one in which every part of the IT infrastructure - storage, network, mobility and even apps - is being brought into play," he notes.
Software-defined networking
According to Jansen van Rensburg, the IT models that enterprise customers want to employ now are not just hybrid, they are much more fluid. There is a recognition that the data centre, the network, security and other IT functions, all need to work together as one streamlined, responsive converged engine, rather than individual hardware-driven cogs in the machine, he adds.
"This is why VMware is seeing high levels of interest in software-defined networking (SDN) solutions, such as VMware's NSX platform, that are taking virtualisation beyond the data centre. The potential here is enormous. The SDN market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 89%, from $960 million in 2014 to $8 billion worldwide in 2018," he reveals.
It is important to note that according to Gartner, "virtualisation, in the form of virtual machines (VMs) and containers, is a fundamental enabler to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and it will be used to establish private cloud services, public cloud services and interoperable hybrid cloud services. Effectively, all IaaS offerings will rely on VMs or container technology", says Jansen van Rensburg.
"If you look at the software-defined data centre and then the offshoot of software-defined networking and storage, I think that it is safe to say that these would not exist without the hypervisor. You cannot build these systems without a hypervisor at the core."
Need for change
But the hypervisor itself needs to change, he agrees. "Which is why we recently announced the new VMware vSphere Integrated Containers - a technology that marks a step forward for us where we can now help customers develop cloud-native applications quicker, reusing components through the application of container technology."
He believes these technologies will help customers improve the development process as areas such as security and isolation, service-level agreements, data persistence, networking services and management can be built into containers and then deployed or used in the production process much quicker.
"Remember, if you are going to pave a roadmap to the cloud, then you need to embrace 'speed of delivery' and this can only be achieved through cloud-native applications that are supported by a hypervisor, like VMware's, that allow you to run in any environment and on any device," Jansen van Rensburg concludes.
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