Tomorrow I'm attending a conference in London organised by VMWare - VMware Symposia 2007. It should be an interesting day, not least because I'm keen to see what people really feel about the licensing and support issues I have touched on previously.
With IBM, Oracle and Microsoft making it extremely difficult to deploy products like VMWare cost-effectively in a production environment, I began wondering whether people really were implementing production systems using server virtualisation.
I have been in correspondence with Scott Lowe about this, who found several examples of VMWare in production. Scott says:
It’s right to point out the deficiencies that the major software firms have in their licensing and support policies – but it’s also right to point out that they are behind the times.
Scott believes these large software players will be left behind. Perhaps so.
But I would hope they change their server virtualisation policies to encourage wider adoption, rather than see it as a quick win to tax users.
As I'm sure delegates will hear tomorrow, VMWare and other virtualisation server products improve data centre's efficiency, reducing its carbon footprint and overall environmental impact. Do the biggest names in software really want to hinder green IT?
