VMware criticizes OS vendors virtualization strategy

VMware methodically continues to apply its aggressive strategy at 360 degrees and, after attacking Microsoft on Windows licensing, it’s now directly challenging other OS vendors.

Quoting from TechWorld:

Operating systems vendors who jump on the bandwagon have missed the point, according to VMware’s president, Diane Greene.

Vendors including Microsoft and Red Hat, who are integrating virtualisation functionality into their operating systems, are sacrificing the value proposition of a hypervisor independent of the operating system, she said at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco, yesterday.

“Traditionally, the operating system manages the hardware and manages the application. Once you virtualise with a hypervisor, that is now what is managing the hardware, not the OS,” Greene said. “Now the operating system is just managing the application. So certainly Windows and Red Hat are moving to integrate virtualisation into their OS, but part of the value proposition seems to be lost when you do that.”…

Read the whole article at source.

With these statements, which express a known position anyway, VMware is indirectly hitting the Linux community as well, since the new KVM virtualization project appears as a kernel module and could put back Linux in key position on the virtualization stack.