Edward Aractingi started it all back on March 20 when he blogged about why VMware should open source ESX Server. Tarry Singh then weighed in on the matter from his weblog. Both men make very good points on the matter.
It’s true that there is a lot of virtualization work being done in the open source community. We have the Xen hypervisor, now capable of hosting unmodified guest operating systems through the hardware-assisted virtualization support of the newest Intel and AMD CPUs; we have the inclusion of KVM in the Linux kernel and the addition of VMI into the next stable kernel; and projects such as OpenVZ thriving as well. That’s a lot of activity going on around virtualization and virtualization-related technologies. And, while it’s most definitely not open source, we also must consider the impact of “Viridian,†Microsoft’s hypervisor to be release shortly after Windows Server 2007 (aka “Longhornâ€).
The real question comes to this: will open source commoditize the hypervisor? If you agree that the introduction of open source hypervisors such as Xen will commoditize the hypervisor, then VMware’s future needs to lie with other technologies, such as the management layer and value-added functionality such as live migration (VMotion), dynamic load balancing (VMware DRS), and high availability (VMware HA). In that scenario, VMware would be better served to open source the ESX Server code and allow the community to drive development of the hypervisor itself. I think that’s a viable model, one that has been embraced by other organizations with varying degrees of success.
If, on the other hand, you don’t think that the hypervisor will become a commodity, then the idea of open sourcing ESX Server doesn’t really hold a lot of value. Why release your competitive advantage? Instead, you continue to develop the hypervisor and add features and functionality to it to differentiate it from the competitors.
What do you think? Will the hypervisor become a commodity? I think it’s a bit too early to tell. Open source aficionados point to the success of Linux and tell you that the OS is becoming a commodity, but look at the reality of the sales numbers for Windows Vista. Perhaps the OS is becoming a commodity, but has anyone bothered to tell people buying Windows Vista? Linux has had years to make “the proprietary OS historyâ€, and is only now starting to really have an effect. Will open source virtualization efforts take the same time? If so, VMware has plenty of time to decide the course of action to take. In the meantime, I think that VMware has done a reasonably good job of blending open source code, proprietary technologies, and published standards into their products. If they can continue to find the right balance between these often contradictory positions, I think they’ll continue to be successful.
Tags: ESX, OSS, Virtualization, VMware
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I see some of this push to virtualize the hypervisor as much to do about nothing. Look at the major open source hypervisor, Xen. The owner of the code has not even released the paravirtualized drivers that make networking even palatable as evidenced by even their comments in their performance benchmark whitepaper. What good is an open source hypervisor if the performance is so poor as to be unusable for production workloads without further modification. VirtualIron also is not completely open source with its ability to Live Migrate. It would be similar if VMware released just kernel and then conversely held back the ability not just for VMotion or DRS but to create virtual switches or the memory balloon driver.
VMware already does open source some of their code as necessitated by GPL licenses and some that is not, such as VMI. The SDK already released enables users to create sophisicated replacements to VirtualCenter and VCB. The real question should be why should VMware be held to a higher standard than say Xen, VirtualIron, or SWsoft?
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Kent,
Good points!
I completely agree with you. Companies want to “open source” their products, but they are really only open sourcing the code for those components that don’t hold a competitive advantage, and then using the “open source” to draw attention to themselves. Hence, VMware would only open source the VMkernel (the heart of ESX Server), just as Xen has only open sourced its hypervisor, and hold the rest of the code back. Is this a mistake? Hard to say. As a company, they exist to make money for their shareholders, so they have to keep that in mind and can’t give away EVERYTHING. They don’t make enough money on professional services (they push that off to their partners and resellers) to give the software away for free, so they can’t adopt that model. It seems to me that IF VMware were to open source the VMkernel (or all of ESX Server), the only way to keep a sustainable business model is to hold back stuff like VMotion, DRS, HA, and the like.
As I stated above, I think that (so far) VMware has done a fairly decent job of balancing open source code, proprietary technologies, and published standards. For right now at least, I don’t see any real business benefit to open sourcing the VMkernel or ESX Server.
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EMC pulls the threads for VMware’s business decision . You can rest assured that they’ll follow the best strategy at most appropriate time . Remember opensource is now a business strategy .
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