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.'"

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[jfekendall]

As a guy who has toured their facilities, they seem to push IBM products: specifically Blades. There is no doubt in my mind that there is some bias at the hardware level. But I don't see AMD support going away quite yet. It's really anyone's guess.

Re:From TFA

[Neil Watson]

Most of our ESX hosts (about a dozen in total) are AMD chips.

Pfft. I'm not impressed.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've dealt directly with the folks at VMware, and I have to say that I'm just not impressed. I love the product, when it works. But lately I've had difficulty with being able to run VMware on some of the more modern OS's. The workstation in particular, with Fedora and Centos, I had to jump through hoops (and even then had trouble). The server was far better for Centos. But still, the Linux compatibility is something that I'd expect better from the folks at VMware; especially since they seem to have rather high, self-inflated opinions of themselves here.

Another main tool that I use is to judge a company is in how they handle contractors. In short, they are stll quite clueless. Contractors tend to do a lot of key work (in some companies, it is all the real work which gets done). A few years ago, they weren't hanlding contractors at all. This year, I got a call from them, and while I'm sure the manager thought otherwise, I could tell that they were feeding me a bunch of B.S..

For one thing, they were completely unable to move fast. Quality talent is hard to find in Silicon Valley these days (I know, as I'm in the process of trying to hire top talent myself). It was going to take VMware two weeks(!) just to line up the interviews. Excuse me, but while you can get away with this for fulltime people, it doesn't cut it with contractors. For a contractor, down time is unpaid time; and I'm not going to sit around waiting for anyone to push through the red tape. Things move fast for me, and in two weeks I can find a new gig starting completely from scratch (4 weeks tops, and that was during the dot-com bust).

Then there was other BS about having to work your way up, yadda yadda. Excuse me, but I've been hacking kernels longer than many folks have been alive. I'm a contractor, not an employee; nor do I want to go fulltime. You bring contractors in to do a job, get it done, and get out. "Working up" is for employees.

Oh yes, and then he had the gall to say that they didn't really like contractors. Well, nobody likes to pay contractor rates. But that's a really excellent way to alienate people. I appreciate the honesty though, and will avoid VMware in the future. So basically I told them to piss off (not in those words; as a contractor you learn to be far more diplomatic).

In short, I came away with the impression that VMware thinks they are so hot that they can afford to dink around and pull people's chains. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. It might have in 2003. But not now. And especially since there are 50,000 H1-B's who are going to be leaving this year.

So, in short, I'm not impressed that this company has the fundamentals together to be a good investment. I sure wouldn't invest in them with.

I wish good luck to the folks at VMware. Their product has been extremely useful to me when I could get it to work. But honestly, you need to get off of your high horse and get back down to Earth. The valley is littered with the bones of other companies who had similar high opinions of themselves, but didn't have the basics down.

Trusted Computing

[goombah99]

VMware's association with intel brings to mind some questions related to Trusted Computing. Now setting aside whether or not you like trusted computing, it does enable some valuable applications so it's going to happen. Now is all the implementations I've seen described there is a progressive trust is creates as each layer of the os-middle-ware-applications-data validates the next layer is unaltered. And all this starts with some trusted boot loader.

it's difficult to see anyway that around not having this seed trust be in some piece of unalterable hardware. And even though they are not doing trusted computing I would specualte that apple puts in a few hardware doo-dads so the software can validate it's running on apple hardware. (they may not be taking advantage of this yet but I bet it's lurking).

So then since it's likely that intel will be making the trusted computing hardware, will they grant the ability to emulate the hardware to their VM?

Re:What does this hold for AMD

[PalmKiller]

Bootcamp is NOT like vmware...bootcamp is just a boot manager that lets the intel mac reboot into windows...it probably has some bios emulation stuff, but its no vmware. Vmware runs different virtual systems simultaenously....not just one at a time.

From http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/ [apple.com]

Run Windows natively

Once you've completed Boot Camp, simply hold down the option key (that's the "alt" key for you longtime Windows users) at startup to choose between Mac OS X and Windows. After starting up, your Mac runs Windows natively just like a PC. Simply restart to come back to Mac.