This blog entry has been floating around The VAR Guy’s head for about six months. But several recent developments prompted our resident blogger to finally take a look at the looming data center battle involving Red Hat and VMware. Here’s some perspective.
First, a little background: Matt Asay, author of The Open Road blog and COO of Canonical, recently noted heightened hostilities between Red Hat and VMware.
What’s driving the competition? No surprise, the initial debate involved who would control the data center: Operating system providers (Microsoft, Red Hat, Novell, etc.) or virtualization specialists (Citrix, VMware, etc.). But increasingly, operating system players like Microsoft and Red Hat have their own virtualization stories.
Getting Cozy With Server Makers
The showdown between Red Hat and VMware gets extra interesting when you toss in established and emerging server makers.
Red Hat had a prominent position at Hewlett-Packard’s recent HP Americas Partner Conference. The Red Hat-HP combo is looking to gang up against Oracle-Sun.
But here’s a twist: One of the most intriguing server stories right now involves Cisco Systems. That’s right, Cisco’s Unified Computing System (which converges networking, storage and servers) is catching on with data center customers, according to a range of large distributors like Avnet Technology Solutions and Westcon’s Comstor team. If you keep a close eye on Cisco’s UCS server strategy, you’ll hear some mention of Red Hat — but lots of loud chatter involving VMware.
Looking ahead, Red Hat continues to polish its own Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) strategy. And it’s safe to expect Red Hat to increasingly train channel partners on RHEV, especially since roughly 60 percent of Red Hat’s revenues now involve channel partners. (The VAR Guy will share more details in the second annual Open Source 50 report on May 24, 2010). Plus, The VAR Guy expects more Red Hat virtualization surprises at the Red Hat Summit (June 22-25, Boston).
Of course, VMware isn’t standing still. A new Acadia initiative, led by former Compaq CEO Michael Capellas, will promote joint VMware, EMC and Cisco offerings. And VMware’s SpringSource division has been on an acquisition spree to help partners and IT executives more easily manage data centers.
Near term, most VARs still consider Red Hat a Linux company and VMware a virtualization company. Long term, Matt Asay is correct: Channel partners will increasingly view Red Hat and VMware as industry rivals. And at some point, partners may need to choose sides.
Sign up for The VAR Guy’s Newsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center; and via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; Twitter and VARtweet.
Read More About This Topic
Share This Post
Tags: Avnet | Hewlett-Packard | HP Americas Partner Conference | Matt Asay | The Open Source 50 | VMware
Interact: Add a Comment | Trackback Link | Permalink
Subscribe: RSS Feed
The war is becoming more real as the two companies head toward an unavoidable collision. I have often made the case that VMware is alive because of Microsoft, or more precisely, because of multi-platform workloads.
Now let me explain.
Businesses that made the wise decision (a long time ago) to settle on a single platform infrastructure (say all Solaris) have reaped the rewards of such an act. They would never need VMware as Solaris has containers which allow consolidation and multi-tenancy. You can develop in Java, deploy on a Java Application Server, consolidate (and virtualize) in Zones and cluster for redundancy. I use Solaris here as an example, but the same setup is easily done in RedHat, Ubuntu, Suse, etc. albeit with differently named technologies. With a multi-platform development language like Java, the possibilities are endless and nothing from Microsoft is required.,
There is a lot more to delve into with that whole argument, but suffice it to say that if a business had a mix of platforms (Microsoft, RedHat, Suse, etc.) and they wanted a single infrastructure to consolidate on top of, VMware was the answer. VMware will remain the answer until companies realize that they can do so much more if they code every app that they use in a multi-platform language like Java and consolidate to a Linux or Unix OS. They will never have a need for VMware again. It was a no brainer for VMware to buy Spring Source as they saw this coming as well.
The war is definitely coming, and it will be between VMware, RedHat, Solaris (Oracle). The war will be over the stack that the next generation of enterprise applications written in Java will run on.
Ernest: you raise some intersting points. But as long as CIOs depend on Windows Server-centric applications like Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server mixed with Linux apps it seems like the data center wars will be focus on virtualization software.
We’re testing against RHEV right now. While the product does work somewhat (RHEL 5 guests crash and even the RHEV-H does sometimes), it’s at LEAST two to three FULL version revs from competing with the likes of VMware.
So…. it’s interesting technology, but IMHO, I wouldn’t deploy RHEV today.
Red Hat will be porting the .Net application that drives RHEV (there is NO other way to drive it btw) to Java J2EE (JBoss). That will take a little while yet… so they might announce it, but I’d think that’s at least 6 mos. out still (IMHO). That will at least get rid of the Windows 2003 requirement, but WILL require a separate Red Hat JBoss server platform (I think… I know they are planning to use Java anyhow… and given how the .Net RHEV-M operates today, I figure we’re looking at a JBoss implementation).
Red Hat will also need to open WIDE the door to what can be virtualized. What exactly? Well, if they want to take on VMware they have to handle at LEAST the plethora of things that can virtulized using VMware (which is a pretty hefty list).
We’ve looked at Xen, RHEV and some sub players (even UCS a bit) and so far only one stands out… VMware (regardless of price).
Chris: The VAR Guy appreciates your hands-on perspective. Our resident blogger has learned not to under-estimate Red Hat. But on the other hand, The VAR Guy hears customers are still willing to pay a premium for VMware because (A) it works and (B) it saves money via data center consolidation projects…
-TVG