Talk about the cat among the pigeons? I was certainly aware that MS’s 2008 was to have Hyper-V included at a minimal cost of USD$28 but that is not due for another 5 months or so, and it was always expected that the pricepoint would come down to meet MS but this is quite early I would have thought?
As Alessandro points out - this will cause some serious pain in the Sales Channel, this is where Citrix had a big jump on VMware and as far as I am aware VMware was getting very serious about trying to ramp this up ASAP - but it would now appear that one of those benefits or sales models that was being offered to the partners will now be disappearing?
So I wonder what this will do to Citrix’s Xen pricing, I can only imagine that they are going to join VMware and MS and will want to be in there competing on price as well?
So the best guess at the moment is that most of Ron Oglesby’s crystal ball gazing of a couple of years back is now coming to fruition and the Hypervisor is already a commodity - so let’s move on to management of the Virtual World? 
Dell to give VMware ESX Server 3i for free?
Saturday, March 15, 2008 | 4 Comments
Not only Dell is going to sell virtualization-ready solutions (hardware + VMware ESX Server 3i) in one click, but it seems that the OEM vendor is going to give ESX Server 3i for free.
As last article of the week The Inquirer reports the words of Martin Niemer, Senior Product Marketing Manager at VMware, which says that Dell will not charge anything for the hypervisor.
If confirmed this decision will have a serious impact on the sales channel.
On one side other OEMs that have a distribution agreement with VMware (HP, IBM, Fujitsu and other) will be almost obliged to do the same to not give Dell any competitive advantage.
On the other side the VMware distributors and resellers will see their chances to sell ESX Server in the SMB market fall down near to zero.
virtualization.info: Dell to give VMware ESX Server 3i for free?
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March 25th, 2008 at 12:15 am
[…] the following day followed which was then followed by a few other blogs reacting to the news with similar posts. Although the announcement of this possibility was, and still is, exciting, the comments […]
March 26th, 2008 at 8:57 am
Halleluiah - Amen!
Ron Oglesby is the preacher and we should all be the choir - the platform is going to be less important, management of the platform is going to be more important than the platform - understanding how to scale these big environments, etc.
Brian Madden just espoused that VMWare could be dead in 5 years saying…
“VMware is going to be a footnote in the history of IT,” he predicted, “albeit an important footnote, no doubt about it, because of the way that they’ve changed the industry. But in the long run, I think our kids will be talking about VMware in their history classes.”
He may not be high up on the VMWorld VIP invite list but you never now, that kind of candor may be appreciated.