Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
The Rise of Open-Source Virtualization Solutions
By
George Dunlap, Community
Manager and Chairman of the XenProject Advisory Board
For the
longest time, VMware was the 800-lb gorilla in the virtualization market space;
having said that though, their profitability has been falling for years. According to the SEC, in 2019 it was getting
so bad that VMware resorted to some accounting tricks to hide from investors
how quickly their profit was falling.
They have now been acquired by Broadcom, who have stated to their
investors that they are going to focus on the 600 most profitable companies in
the market. Furthermore, the other major
proprietary hypervisor company, Microsoft, is de-emphasizing Hyper-V and trying
to push companies more towards the cloud.
The
conclusion is clear: the market can no longer support proprietary on-prem
hypervisors. The development model where
a single company develops and maintains an entire hypervisor codebase from
scratch, and is the sole licensor and marketer of that hypervisor, is too
inefficient to be sustainable.
But
customers still need on-prem hypervisors.
VMware's focus will leave a gap in the market that still needs to be
filled. This opens up an opportunity for
a diverse range of new hypervisor products on the market, based on open-source
hypervisors like Xen and KVM.
Already
there are a number of new products, bragging of a hypervisor "built from the
ground up"; but upon closer inspection, many of these turn out to be a
hypervisor assembled from the ground
up using pre-existing open-source hypervisors.
The value proposition is clear: open source is simply a more efficient
way to do development. Each company can
take the existing hypervisor and package it, configure it, and tailor it to the
needs of their own particular customers, encouraging experimentation and
innovation, and further enriching the open-source hypervisor ecosystem.
As a result,
it is likely that the virtualization market will see a surge in the adoption of
open-source solutions in the coming year. This will help to fill the void left
by VMware and Microsoft, creating a more diverse and competitive market that is
better able to meet the needs of a wide range of customers.
In
conclusion, the virtualization market is set to undergo significant changes in
the coming year, with the emergence of a diverse range of new players based on
open-source hypervisors. This shift will be driven by a number of factors,
including the acquisition of VMware, the increasing cost of proprietary
solutions, and the move away from on-premises solutions by Microsoft. The
open-source development model is well-suited to the virtualization market, and
is likely to play a key role in the diversification of the market in the coming
year.
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ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
George Dunlap worked with the Xen project
while a graduate student at the University of Michigan before receiving his PhD
in 2006, and then worked as a core Xen developer for many years for Citrix's
open-source team in Cambridge, England. He is now community manager and
chairman of the XenProject Advisory Board. He has done work in many areas of
Xen, including performance analysis, scheduling, and memory management. He
writes technical articles regularly for the xenproject.org blog, and has had
articles published in Linux.com. He is also a speaker at various events such
as academic conferences (OSDI and VEE),
project-focused conferences (Xen Summit), general open-source conferences
(FOSDEM, LinuxCon), and customer training sessions for Citrix.