Intel Invests $218M in VMWare, Preparing for IPO

RulerOf writes "TechNewsWorld is carrying an article detailing that Intel has made an investment in VMWare for $218.5 million in anticipation of VMWare's imminent IPO. With an expected value of $23-25 a share, VMWare's IPO shows a value of $950 million. This investment brings Intel to an approximately 13% ownership of the EMC subsidiary, and helps to strengthen ties between the two companies. According to the article, 'VMware's virtualization platform runs on Intel architecture and most deployments of the tools are on systems using Intel chips.'"

Not 13%

[crow]

The IPO is only for about 10% of the company, and Intel has pre-purchased about a quarter of that stock, so that would be about 2.5% of the new VMWare that Intel will own. Or at least that's what all the other reports are suggesting.

[Disclaimer: I work for EMC, but have no connection to VMWare; I have no inside knowledge of the IPO or related transactions.]

Re:Intel AMD

[Richard W.M. Jones]

My only hope is that Intel doesn't skew it's architecture so much that it becomes incompatible and that AMD is left behind. Would be nice if AMD could partner up as well, or create a consortium for "next gen architecture and virtualization enhancements" kinda like how MMX, SSE etc came about for graphics.

Too late - it's already happened. Intel and AMD have incompatible virtualisation technologies. Intel's is called VT [intel.com] with various sub-designations such as VT-d for virtualising DMA. AMD's is called AMD-V [amd.com] and is completely different. AMD have sub-divisions too, such as support for Nested Page Tables which Intel are still developing.

Xen supports both. Not certain about VMWare, but I'd be surprised if they didn't support both too. One interesting fact is that hardware virtualisation isn't faster than software approaches like VMWare's emulation or Xen paravirtualisation. Although this will probably change in future (and also Xen paravirt is no good for you if you want to run Windoze or other binary-only OSes).

Rich.

Re:Motives?

[ergo98]

Do I read correctly that they invested $218M and expect to have $130M after the IPO? That smells like some other motive than stock investing...

EMC is retaining 90% ownership of VMWare, and is IPOing shares representing 10% of the company. That 10% is expected to bring in $949 million, giving the whole company a market capitalization of around $10 billion.

2.5% of $10 billion is around $250 million of course.

Intel's investing in other virtualization company

[ericdujardin]

See http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4223741314.html [linuxdevices.com] It looks like they want to make sure good virtualization software is available on their processors.

Re:From TFA

[RulerOf]

It's not that VMWare doesn't work on AMD chips, I run VMWare on several AMD's and it works just peachy. What they're getting at is support for a hardware Hypervisor. The hypervisor is that spiffy little bit of logic that keeps track of x86 instructions inside of a CPU and determines which machine, real or virtual, that said intruction belongs to. Traditionally, this has been done in software, but porting that intruction set over to hardware, as Intel has done, and I believe AMD won't be doing until their quad core line comes to market, significantly improves the speed of virtualization to the point where there is no difference between a real OS and a virtualized one (except for multi-OS overhead, of course). That was one of the whole points of that "Blue Pill" idea some months ago.

Re:Pfft. I'm not impressed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow - you just don't undestand the market, or your own words. You said "If you'd use RHEL or SLES you'd have faired better". Normally this implies that the product would have worked better. But you seem to mean that one could open a support ticket and hope and pray that maybe someone would help.

I don't think you've ever dealt with the "support" these companies offer. The bottom line is that if the basics don't work out of the box on Centos, it's not going to work on RHEL. You are guaranteed to be required to have to open a service ticket.

So explain to me why I should buy a product which doesn't work, and that may not ever get fixed in the timeframe that I need it? I'll stick with the options that I know work, thankyouverymuch.

As for the market, the free products are superb marketing and advertising. I have no problem with getting my customers to pay for the full product and service agreements; I've done this many times in the past. I'd daresay I do it every place that I go, but there may be an odd exception that I've forgotten. In short, many companies have made lots of money off of my recommendations. And I've cost other companies a lot of money by not recommending them. VMWare right now is in the latter camp.

Unless and until VMware starts realizing how much bad advertising is costing them, and fixes things, I won't be using or recommending their products. You can take that fact to the bank; but not, alas, the money I'd like to be sending them. That will have to go to the other solutions.