VMware Delivers Eponymous Freebie Hypervisor, Sets Support Prices

Published: July 20, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in February, the VMware subsidiary of storage vendor EMC changed the name of its GSX Server virtualization hypervisor to VMware Server, added some new features, put out a beta program, and said that it would eventually offer a production version as freeware with commercial-grade support. Late last week, VMware Server went commercial and VMware put out its price list.

VMware Server is a pre-emptive strike against the forthcoming Xen hypervisor and commercialized support for it that XenSource and the very attractive low price--free, in fact--that Microsoft has set for its Virtual Server 2005 product. VS 2005 is not nearly as sophisticated as VMware Server, so it is worth a premium compared to what Microsoft is charging, and even if they were at parity, Microsoft would likely charge little or nothing to get dominant market share, at least among companies that are trying to virtualize Windows and Linux server environments. In April, XenSource divulged how it was going to package its commercialized products when they ship later this year, but has not yet announced pricing. In the midst of all of this, VMware wants to keep its dominant position in the server virtualization market for X86 and X64 machines, and one way to do that is to broaden its product line and make it less expensive.

To that end, GSX Server was changed to VMware Server and was re-launched as a freebie, to seed the market with lots of users, and with commercialized services and support for those who rolled it into production and who wanted to have VMware backing their operations up in case something goes wrong. While VMware has not gone open source, as Sun Microsystems has with Solaris 10 and various Linux vendors do with their distros, the marketing model is much the same. And, it appears to be working. Since February, the beta of VMware Server has seen more than 700,000 downloads. To date, VMware has a customer base of more than 20,000 customers and perhaps, adding ESX Server, its bare-metal hypervisor, and the former GSX Server together, maybe 200,000 licenses in five years of marketing and sales. (The number might be a bit larger.) In five months time, VMware has expanded its potential customer base by a factor of five. However, now it has to convert these freebies into services sales.

The new features in VMware Server are going to be a draw to certain customers, but paying customers seem to prefer ESX Server so far, which costs many thousands of dollars per two-socket server; depending on features, the price can go to nearly $6,000 on a server that might cost half that. Still, for the budget conscious IT shops that can't wait for XenSource to get products to market and who cannot afford ESX Server, VMware Server might have enough server virtualization features to be useful. VMware Server runs on 32-bit X86 and 64-bit X64 processors from Intel and AMD. On top of such a machine, you add a 32-bit or 64-bit Windows or Linux operating system. Then, the VMware Server hypervisor loads on top of that, and allows you to carve up multiple guest virtual machines and load operating systems into them. The 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Linux, Windows, NetWare, and Solaris 10 can be loaded into these guest slices. The 64-bit main memory and two-way Virtual SMP features of VMware Server--which used to be key features of ESX Server--are "experimental" at this point, which may cause some customers to pause. VMware Server also supports the VirtualCenter hypervisor administration tool, and includes a command that captures a snapshot of the state of a virtual machine and allows an administrator to roll back to that snapshot. (This is something all servers, physical or virtual, desperately need.) The current VMware Server also has experimental support for Intel's VT hardware-assisted virtualization features, which are part of the Core processors it is rolling out now in two-socket servers and will add to four-socket servers later this year. The software also has an upgrade path to ESX Server 3, which was just announced a little more than a month ago.

While VMware Server is free, support for it is not. Gold-level support, which offers 12-hour support for the five business days each week, costs $350 per year for every two sockets in a server; platinum-level support, which offers 24-hour, seven-day tech support to customers for a year, costs $450 per two sockets in a server. If you want to use VirtualCenter to control the partitions in your machines, you have to pay $600 for every two sockets in the box. This is a perpetual license, apparently, not an annual support contract.

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