VMware, the undisputed leader of virtualization that in 2008 cut out the founders, Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, to forcefully penetrate the cloud computing market (also thanks to the vision of Paul Maritz), these days is creating interesting movements on the network.
1. It seems that VMware, which we remember is the independent daughter of the giant EMC, wants to split to separate the assets related to Cloud Computing from the rest of the VMware business, and it seems that Paul Moritz will be the leader of this spinoff, while big pieces of EMC will take control of VMware.
According to this other article , however, it seems that they are completely unfounded. On the other hand, at present it would be really complex, almost impossible, and counter-productive to separate cloud computing from virtualization, making different businesses with different orientations.
2. VMware today signed an agreement to acquire Nicira, a pioneer in software-defined networking (SDN) and a leader in network virtualization.
The acquisition of Nicira will bring important expansions to the networking portfolio and will certainly increase its leadership in the software-defined networking sector.
Nicira is at the forefront of network software, enabling the dynamic creation of virtual network infrastructures and services that are completely decoupled and independent of physical network hardware. Nicira is already present in large providers such as AT&T, DreamHost, RackSpace.
Nicira is also very active in the open source world, for example the Open vSwitch, to connect physical networks and different hypervisors. It seems that VMware doesn’t want to make a dent in this activity towards free software.
Let’s enjoy this beautiful video that illustrates the potential of Nicira
Now we should reflect on this acquisition in relation to the deep ties that VMware currently has with Cisco, which was the first to introduce switch appliances to the VMware platform to expand the native networking capabilities of VMware products. The popular Cisco Nexus 1000V that uses the vNetwork Distributed Switch API to provide advanced networking capabilities to virtual machines.
What will Cisco say about this?