VMware’s New Acronym: FUD

It’s time for another episode of the “Sour Grapes Chronicles.” This week I’m spotlighting VMware and the breathless diatribe it unleashed last week against all things Microsoft. I am, of course, referring to the white paper the company published denouncing what it claims are Microsoft’s anti-competitive moves in the virtualization market. The document attempts to paint Microsoft as deliberately sabotaging VMware’s ability to integrate Windows and other products, however, many of their technical arguments are just plain silly.

For example: VMware claims that Microsoft is rigging its Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) demo solutions to deactivate themselves when they detect VMware. But the screenshots they provide in the white paper show Microsoft’s Product Activation logic simply requesting that the customer re-activate the software. Since this mechanism is triggered whenever you make significant changes to the underlying hardware – even virtualized hardware – it makes sense that the move from a Microsoft Virtual Server image (the original format of the VM) to a VMware image (which has a significantly different virtual hardware profile) would trigger it.

A simple solution would be for VMware to better mimic the Virtual Server runtime, including the virtual hardware profile (chipset, video, CPU), and thus avoid the Product Activation issue altogether. They can’t expect Microsoft to throw-out years of anti-piracy technology just because they happen to break it in such a predictable fashion.

VMware also makes the argument that Microsoft is restricting customers from using VMware to evaluate Microsoft software by requiring Virtual Server for its VHD demo downloads. However, the language they refer to – part of the System Requirements section of the VHD download page – simply states that you’ll need Virtual Server in order to open and use a VHD, much like the way you’ll need Microsoft Word in order to open and read a Word-formatted document. Nowhere does it say that you are restricted from using VMware to run the VHDs, just as you are free to open a Word document in OpenOffice Writer or any other compatible editor. Failure to mention your direct competitor when listing system requirements for your product does not constitute anti-competitive behavior.

There are other examples, however, suffice to say that VMware is beginning to worry about Microsoft’s long term virtualization strategy. I, for one, am glad to see VMware sweat a little. For too long they have reigned unchallenged as the x86/x64 virtualization standard bearer. And while this kind of diatribe may be effective at swaying the technically illiterate (i.e. Wall Street analysts), veteran IT shops will see the white paper for what it really is: Classic FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt).