On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Hetz Ben-Hamo wrote:
> > My conclusion led me quicly to the investor relationship page in their
> > Web site, where I was informed that the company is privately held, so
> > I can't buy their shares. No wonder. The smart venture capitalists
> > dump on the public worthless shares in lame dotcoms, while they keep
> > to themselves the really good stuff.
>
> Well, their biggest investment came from Dell Investment arm. Dell invested $20
> million at VMWare.
>
> According to their managment (some of their managers are Israelies) they are in
> profit since the early beginning.
Thanks for the background information.
Nice to know that it is possible to make a profit when you have something
really useful to sell.
> > On the other hand, I am predicting bright future for them. After
> > people learn the VMware way to reduce the pain of administering MS-Windows
> > installations, they'll cease to directly install MS-Windows on their
> > PCs, choosing instead to install them in virtual machines running on more
> > stable (such as Linux) hosts.
>
> Hardly.
>
> 1. VMWare in most cases runs at 50% of your machine speed, with half of your
> memory.
PCs are now faster than necessary for normal user applications.
When you really need the speed, and you control the program's source code,
you can have it run at the same time on the native Linux OS and enjoy the
full speed of the machine. On the other hand, with anti-virus software,
you have to choose between MS-Windows (with anti-virus) or Linux (to run
applications at maximum speed), meaning dual-boot machine.
I concede that high-end games are a different story, and VMware does not
currently support them well (or at all) due to the incompletenesses
pointed out below.
> 2. VMWare PC emulation is incomplete (see panics with the latest .Net build
> beta, longhorn alpha, Red Hat 8.0 panics etc) - they add stuff as they release
> new versions (3.2 as I write this email doesn't fully support 8.0 and rawhide)
>
> > For this to happen, however, VMware will have to develop some drivers
> > to allow real-time DVD and video playing, and the like (not a serious
> > problem, if they can exploit the consumer market).
>
> Very problematic issues which envolves some heavy tuning for real time and fast
> performance (thats why you don't have full screen video for example). Add to
> that the fact that VMWare don't have so far any intention to do more hardware
> direct support (like their partial USB stuff - try to connect a webcam to a
> VMWare session or any async stuff hardware to see what I mean).
Given the benefits I claim, there is a potentially big consumer market for
VMware (at least unless Microsoft threatens VMware not to play with such
stuff), so VMware can justify investment into development of solutions for
the above.
> > The benefits from switching from direct installation to virtual machine
> > based installation:
> >
> > 1. Windows XP activation mechanism won't prevent you from upgrading
> > your hardware, as the virtual machine (which is all that Windows XP
> > sees) stays the same.
>
> Wrong. Try to change the "hardware" enviroment in a legit Win XP copy for more
> thrn 6 times and you'll get the activation key request.
You don't change the "hardware" environment in the virtualized Windows XP
copy. At least not when you are using it for work. Then you'll be immune
from the need to reactivate due to unexpected need to upgrade (for
example, when your hardware goes kaput and you buy a new PC and restore
software from backups).
If you want to add new sexy hardware and virtualize it (VMware
permitting), then you do it at home, and you reactivate the Windows XP
when it requires you to. This won't disrupt your business.
> > 5. For busy professionals, who really need stable PCs, the cost of VMware
> >
> > (about $300 per license) is recouped by not having to twice put the
> > PC out of service for 1/2 day each time, for OS+applications
> reinstallation.
>
> It got it place, but I hardly see anyone starting to use VMWare and their
> Windows as guest.
If you are confronted with a Windows 95 installation which worked fine for
several years, and ceased to work due to unexpected need to upgrade the PC
from a 300MHz processor based one to a 1.7GHz processor based one (due to
a driver which ceases to work when the clock frequency is higher than
1GHz; and an updated driver needs the OSR2 variant of Windows 95, which
you don't have because yours is an Hebrew version and Microsoft didn't
develop an OSR2 variant for Hebrew), then you can appreciate the option of
virtualizing your OS installation and making it immune of future hardware
upgrades.
> The VMware people are investing their efforts on VMWare ESX and GSX. I tested
> their VMWare ESX and it's a really great. Install it on a very high end server
> (4+ processors, 16GB RAM with plenty of disk space) and install to your client
> their KVM clients - and it works like a charm. You'll get a Red Hat 6.2 console
> on the server and the scripting stuff to do tasks between VM's is really
> amazing (do some scripts, ask the script to reboot some vm to do something,
> switch live to another vm with another OS - really cool stuff) but it costs few
> thousand dollars. The GSX version is for something like 4 guest OS's running in
> 1 machine (you need 2+ processors, 2GB RAM etc)...
So VMware are focused on the high-end market, and VMware won't be
immediately useful for private consumers. From what I see, they'll have a
potential if they ever decide to pay attention also to consumer market.
> On the other hand I do see some bright future to ... wine. I've been
> talking on the phone with Jeremy White (CEO of CodeWeavers) and they'll
> publish soon their road-map. Their current work shows some really cool
> progress, with multiple windows versions emulation (to run several
> versions of the same app without chocking your machine), and lots of
> applications supported (office stuff, multimedia stuff soon (so video
> will be shown way better), and other stuff..
There is one fundamental limitation of wine, which VMware does not have:
As Microsoft put out new versions of their OSes, they add new APIs, and
the wine developers need to run at full speed, to keep up with Microsoft.
VMware operates at a different level, and essentially they need to run to
keep up only for optimizing their products to work well with a new guest
OS (panics under RedHat 8.0 etc. notwithstanding - I guess they were
caused by optimizations, which relied upon assumptions, which were
broken for 1st time by RedHat 8.0).
In summary:
Hetz, thanks for the additional information, food for thought and
opportunity to think aloud about those issues.
--- Omer
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