yet another vmware zimbra take v10.18.01.txt

author: Randy J. Cress date:
Yet another response to zimbra acquisition by vmware.. in this case, the catalyst was an article provided by Gestalt IT: http://gestaltit.com/all/tech/virtualization/rich/vmware-zimbra-vmail

First, no software application should be "optimized" for a specific hypervisor. Citrix claims this with XenApp and then doesn't openly publish what the optimizations are. Why do I want a hacked up hypervisor that can run specific applications faster than others? Imagine if RAM and Hard Drive manufacturers started making claims that Adobe Photoshop runs faster because of specific optimizations on the controllers provided by Crucial and Western Digital.

VMware's sudden diversity isn't really all that sudden, they've stagnated Thinstall's application a year ago while they were trying to break into the application virtualization market. While I would love to see the product mature, it appears to have back burnered it to launch VMware View without an effective way to delivery applications with minimal images. Read the forums regularly, you'll understand the dilemma.

Finally, to the Zimbra purchase. IMHO, email is already a hybrid cloud solution with dependencies on DNS (hybrid cloud) and plenty of users and devices connecting from disparate internet connections. Plenty of businesses have moved their primary mail exchangers (MX) into the cloud for spam filtering since it tends to reduce the amount of traffic to filter locally thus providing more bandwidth.

After that is done let's get to the real issue if you move your mailboxes into the cloud in an environment with many LAN users. If every user has to pull an email over the internet that contains a 1MB attachment (work-related or not) then you've just increased your demands on your internet pipe. With an in-house solution, that 1MB email came in from the outside and now can be redistributed to users internally without the need for any additional internet bandwidth consumption. If their solution involves "caching" VMs, I don't think we've simplified IT, we've just made it more complex.

Are they "EMC/VMware" planning to utilize the RSA wing to make the product compliant with security regulations.. much like's Google's purchase of Postini for Google App users? What about the VCE coalition and Cisco's purchase of Ironport? Could that be the agreed upon spam firewall in the cloud as well? I can't seem to get a timeline on when the Ironport will be virtual appliance, so maybe not anytime soon.

When it is all said and done, it's just email and it either has a per socket cost with mailbox scalability limits or it's another per mailbox charge.

Imagine VMware/Zimbra as a slider bar:

[Microsoft Exchange] <----> [VMware/Zimbra] <----> [Google Apps/Postini]


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