Five weeks or so ago VMWare accounced massive price cuts for their existing products. Today I read that VMWare are redefining their product range completely.
The article has more detailed information, but the basic gist is that VMWare is releasing a new entry-level SKU, not manageable via VirtualCenter (and thus not suited for enterprise, but entirely suited for sites that just want one or two hosts), with SATA support. SATA support has tradiationally been missing from VMWare’s products, and the presence of SATA support was one of the selling points for other virtualisation vendors such as Xensource and VirtualIron.
I asked in my last post “Has VMWare seen the writing on the wall?” I guess it has. It’s not end-game yet, of course: Gartner analysts peg virtualisation use at under 10% of the server market (I don’t have an exact reference for that, but there’s lots of references at 6% or so during late 2006). This is merely the point where VMWare realises that it’s not enough to be the big fish in the pond – Citrix and Microsoft are now in there too.