Virtualization and Vendor Lock-In

Author: Daniel Beveridge, Director of Virtualization Strategy - VIRTERA

Central to the promise of virtualization is the ability to decouple workloads from their underlying layers of technology. In the case of hypervisors, this means that the OS can have a common set of drivers while freely moving between hardware platforms. For application virtualization, the same mobility allows dynamic delivery and execution of software across a range of operating system versions. Major vendors such as VMware actively market virtualization as a way to avoid vendor lock-in at the server level. Companies have welcomed the new freedom, reveling in their new found ability to negotiate more aggressively with hardware vendors who must now account for the ease of migration to new hardware platforms.

The virtualization market has matured over the last few years and the freedoms associated with virtualization of the technology stack have expanded and increasingly become a requirement for companies looking to make investments in the datacenter. What was previously just a possibility has rapidly become a necessity. Ironically, major virtualization vendors have not fully grasped the implications of the revolution they unleashed. Product strategy lags customer expectation by continuing to bundle products in a manner out of step with the elimination of vendor lock-in promised. Companies feel cornered into virtualization investments that may free them from physical server lock-in only to encumber them with hypervisor and associated technology stack lock-in.