> Another possibility is VMWare might be defocusing their traditional virtualization and this is the first of an all-in shift to containers because that's a growth market at the moment.
Supporting container workloads doesn't need to come at the expense of "traditional" virtualization, e.g. see the work being done with vSphere Integrated Containers[1] or AppCatalyst[2], particularly since most (all?) containers ran on cloud providers are running in a VM.
N.B. I work at VMware, but as an engineer in a completely unrelated BU I have absolutely no insight into Workstation/Fusion strategy
> Supporting container workloads doesn't need to come at the expense of "traditional" virtualization...
Absolutely agree with you, I think machine and container virtualization should co-exist in a sophisticated ecosystem and it isn't an either-or. Just as server- and desktop-hosted virtualization should co-exist on another axis of the ecosystem.
I lack insight into why VMWare effectively gave up on holding down the desktop end of the spectrum, which essentially tells customers that the capability to scale from desktops to servers is no longer as important to its mission or business model. Perhaps native desktop OS support for virtualization is shaping up much faster and more robustly than we realize, VMWare execs see the writing on the wall and decided to exit the space on a high note instead of fighting future ever-declining revenues in that space, and they will count upon lower-margin solutions based upon native desktop OS virtualization features to address the desktop-to-server scaling issue.
That would suck. VMWare Fusion/Workstation/Player mean I can run the exact same VM on a Mac, Windows and Linux without any modification.
Having to use VirtualBox over here (which I've had problems with before) and KVM over there and Hyper-V over there and whatever shows up on OS X yet again would be such a pain in the ass.
Supporting container workloads doesn't need to come at the expense of "traditional" virtualization, e.g. see the work being done with vSphere Integrated Containers[1] or AppCatalyst[2], particularly since most (all?) containers ran on cloud providers are running in a VM.
N.B. I work at VMware, but as an engineer in a completely unrelated BU I have absolutely no insight into Workstation/Fusion strategy
[1] http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2015/10/vsphere-integrated-c...
[2] http://getappcatalyst.com/