The VCritical Manifesto

Why the virtualization industry needs a resource like VCritical

Formidable Competition Rising

VMware has dominated the x86 virtualization market without serious competitors for many years, but that’s starting to change as vendors integrate hypervisors into their general-purpose operating systems.

Virtualization is remarkably disruptive — threatening the dominance of monopolistic operating systems by abstracting them away from underlying datacenter hardware.  The juggernaut from Redmond needs a share of the hypervisor market in order to preserve the Windows Server franchise.  In fact, the stakes are so high that Microsoft has made it a practice to lie about their progress.

If you read only Microsoft marketing literature, you’d think that Hyper-V was better than VMware ESX at just one-sixth the cost.  Similarly, Red Hat came out hard with a series of dishonest claims about their immature KVM-based virtualization platform before eventually backing down when the truth was exposed.

That’s why the industry needs VCritical.

Objectivity

Some technical media sources are more objective than others, and journalists with personal agendas are hard to decipher.  It is not necessarily the purpose of VCritical to be an independent source of information, as much as it is to scrutinize inflated claims by vendors jockeying for position.

Analysts balance their vendor relationships delicately, and the top firms seeking a seat as trusted advisor in the enterprise have demonstrated efforts to be as unbiased as possible.

There is no Consumer Reports when it comes to enterprise technology.

Informed Virtualization Criticism

Despite my alignment with VMware, I strive to provide completely accurate information on all vendors — technical comparisons found on VCritical are independently verifiable.

In my disclaimer, I make it clear that I am an employee of the industry virtualization leader.  However, this is not a VMware blog — I pay for it, I decide what to write and when to publish it.  The content here is not reviewed, approved, or endorsed by VMware PR.

It’s that simple.

Why VCritical

Left alone, powerful marketing departments of vendors with immature products would operate with impunity, dishonestly advancing their industry position.

Let’s not leave them alone!

VCritical has reached thousands upon thousands — from administrators to CIOs, from tech journalists to industry analysts — with the truth about virtualization.  It would not have been possible without all the readers, subscribers, and followers that have helped propagate the message.

Thank you for your support.