The VMWare/SpringSource acquisition announcement took me by surprise. My first question was what is VMWare getting themselves into? I have always thought of VMWare as the “Switzerland” of infrastructure tools. Whether you are Windows or Linux, C++ or Java, packaged software or open source VMWare can help you build, test, and deploy your environment. Why are they giving up their independent status by picking a Java framework like Spring?
Then I recalled the SpringSource’s acquisition of Hyperic earlier this year. Hyperic is the open source monitoring tool that watches over many different application servers, databases, and other computing utilities. Clearly, the Hyperic products are of great benefit to VMWare. VMWare suffers as their tools do not have any vision into what individual virtual machines are doing at a given moment. Their systems can tell when a single VM is running hot and attempt to move it to a different computer, but this might not help if the problem is two processes suddenly running hot on the same VM. Hyperic is full of application level performance data to help with this situation.
It isn’t necessarily the Spring framework itself that VMWare is interested in. It is the combination of the Hyperic platform layer with the VMWare infrastructure tools. The union of the two systems will allow VMWare to greatly improve system utilization by moving entire virtual machines or just individual processes around a cloud computing system with percision. This is VMWare moving into the Platform as a Service (PaaS) space of cloud computing.
But this still leaves the question of Java. Clearly attaching to Java will attack Microsoft with their .NET and virtualization efforts. However, why should VMWare pick only one language? One line from the VMWare blog clarifies this apparent limitation:
We have early efforts underway around .Net, PhP, Ruby, and J2EE, and will continue to focus on expanding these as well as newcomers in the rapidly evolving development world.
VMWare is trying to work will all technologies. They will maintain their “Switzerland” status. It will be interesting to see what acquisitions, partnerships, and announcements VMWare will come out with next. I expect there will be more to come shortly.
