In my RSS feed from Slashdot I have just learnt that Xen and VMware are going to work together to create a common approach to the linux kernel and virtualisation. You can read about it here.

This is great news for reasons mentioned in the article. It’s also great news on another front, two companies (or sets of people) have realised that it’s better to work together for the greater good of their users.

Now I’m not so stupid as to think that’s the only reason they are doing it. It looks good and shows that they are listening to their customers (Oracle recently expressed its fustration at “their reluctance to work together”). But think about it this way – it’s better to have a percentage of a customers money than 0%. I’ve seen this in another company that I used to work for, they started to work with competitors letting them resell some of their products as part of a bundle with the competitiors products. Both companies won as both companies got a percentage of the profit instead of no money at all.

I suspect that VMware and Xen see it a similar way. By ensuring that a virtual machine will run on either companies product they get something instead of nothing.

For example, imagine a company starts to use virtual machines to run it’s servers. Previously they would have to select either of the companies products and that was used on all systems. One company gets 100% of the cost of this system. Now in the near future they will be able to pick the best bits from each of the companies products and each company gets a percentage of the cost of the overall system. It will be a smaller amount but at least they are getting something, and anything is better than 0%!

Everybody wins.

Now before somebody points out that Xen is free and you can download VMware Server for free please note the following:

• The artice is takling about hypervisors, and VMware Server is not a hypervisor. VMware ESX is a hypervisor and costs big bucks (Xen the product is open source).
• There is a lot more to a system than the actual product. Training, SLA’s and support are just a few examples of things that you may have to pay for.

Those things aside it’s good for us users, I just wonder when MIcrosoft will join the party…