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VMware VP Raghu Raghuram at Redmond Magazine. Link: Redmond | Redmond Report Article: Driving VMware.

Redmond: What are the major differences between VMware and Microsoft in how each company views hypervisors?

Raghuram: There are some stark differences. Our view is that the core virtualization layer belongs in the hardware. It also has to be much smaller in order to reduce its surface area for attacks. This is why we introduced the 3i architecture, which will become mainstream over the course of this year.

Our product will be less than 32MB, but will still have all the functionality. Our sense is if you turn on the server, you turn on virtualization at the same time. Our approach is similar to that of mainframes and big Unix machines where there's no separate virtualization software as part of the operating system. Our architecture enables this notion of a plug-and-play data center. So, if they need more capacity for the data center, then they just roll in a new server, which is automatically virtualized.

The Microsoft approach is to have virtualization be an adjunct to the OS. With the Virtual Server architecture, it's explicitly a separate layer that relies on the OS. With the Hyper-V architecture, they're still maintaining the same dependency on the OS, so it's not fundamentally different than the Virtual Server in that respect. The downside for customers is the Virtual Server architecture is still tied to a commercial OS, which is fairly vulnerable to attacks and has a big footprint.

Everybody 'gets' server consolidation. The math is easy, the ROI immediate. Do you 'get' business continuity? For many organizations, virtualization can be the difference between a notion of a plan and having a real, operational capability. More from the interview:

Some of these products also address what you are calling IT Service Continuity. How important is this to your strategy going forward?

Very important. Business continuity is the silver bullet for virtualization beyond consolidation. In fact, two-thirds of all our customers are already trying to do business continuity using virtualization. These [products are] designed to automate all processes so that if your data center fails, you can automatically failover to another data center and then fail back. One of the interesting things about business continuity is because it's so complex to do, people have business continuity plans on paper, but they are hardly ever tested. The products we announced enable the automated testing of those sorts of plans.

Link: GigaOM Interview: Dr. Mendel Roseblum, Chief Scientist, VMware

Let’s talk about the data center for a minute. Do you think the whole architecture of the data center needs rethinking?

We went down a rat hole on how we built the data centers. I am not surprised with all the problems we are having with data centers. In my opinion, the architecture has problems because it was built with inferior solutions. What you had was people placing services on servers in a way that led to lightly loaded machines that were idle most of the time. The whole thing was built for peak performance (and not maximum utilization.) Well, idle machines use as much energy as fully utilized machines. The way out of this is to put more on the machines, and get them to be more efficient and take on the work load that will, to some extent, lower the power consumption.

I wrote about pizza boxes becoming a problem, mostly due to low utilization and higher power consumption. It kind of ties in with your thesis.

You have to see them not as boxes but as resources. People are now beginning to utilize virtualization and federate these pizza-box servers. I think if you start to view them as one unit, you can get more utilization out of them. I think in coming months you are going to see a big push to make all servers (and other hardware) inside a data center look more like a single unit. Ironically, if you look at the future — low-end pizza box servers with multicore CPUs running our software — you will start to see the big machine we were building where we got started.

'The operating system shouldn't matter'.

SearchServerVirtualization.com: As we move to a highly virtualized environment, how does the role of the operating system change?

Diane Greene: The operating system shouldn't matter to the customer anymore. What matters to them is the service they're getting and how stable [the OS] is and how well it runs. Once you put in that virtual infrastructure, the only thing that the operating system is there for is to give the application a sort of platform to run on.

[The situation] has gotten turned on its ear where the application is in charge of picking the best operating system. Historically in this industry …Microsoft has …had a complete lock on our industry, where they control the APIs to the applications, they control the APIs to all the hardware and all the hardware devices. It is their march, people go on their timing, subject to where they decide they want to go. They are a great company and they've done a lot of great things, but it is to their cadence. And that changes if there's a virtualization layer there. If all this stuff is open and interoperable, people are going to be able to mix and match, and the cadence is going to be a joint thing in the industry.

Manek Dubash follows up his great VMworld recap with an interview with VMware co-founder Mendel Rosenblum:

Q: What combination of factors has made virtualisation the hot topic of today? A: A lot of the excitement around virtualisation stems from problems in the current software environment - a combination of modern operating systems and applications. People weren't happy with issues such as reliability and security. While the OS is supposed to be in charge of the hardware, people spend too much time managing them, and they're not robust enough to run multiple applications. What was needed was a thinner layer to do the mapping onto the hardware resources.

For example, you could imagine a distributed OS that allows free flow of information between applications, or one that stops bad processes bringing down the entire OS -- but we evolved not to do that.

And some of the older technology was too slow -- now the hardware has arrived.

Diane Greene will be speaking at Tuesday morning's keynote at VMworld. A few weeks back, here's what SKMurphy took home from Diane's talk at TiE. At VMworld, she'll be speaking about virtualization, but TiE is an entrepreneurial association, and so her remarks were more on building VMware the company (which, by the way, is a great place to work):

 

• Users evangelize users, at several key points in its history, VMware has seen it’s growth hit a new take-off point because its users cared enough to make it happen. 6,000 users have signed up for VMworld.
• Open communication keeps everyone on the same page (and moving forward): every Wednesday the company would buy lunch and have an open communication forum to cover recent events, plans, and allow employees to air concerns and issues.
  
• If your technology isn’t evolving fast enough, give it away. In particular when you are in a deathmatch market with Microsoft, neutralize one of their common tactics of giving away technology by giving away your products that are not moving fast enough.
  
• Continually invest in high quality IT infrastructure: it’s the basis for communication, coordination, and collaboration in any high technology firm.
  
• Server Virtualization (consolidating many applications onto one server by leveraging virtualization technology) is more about cutting power consumption and saving floorspace than saving hardware cost. Power has  become the single largest component of the total cost of ownership of hardware.
  

VMware co-founder Mendel Rosenblum will be speaking at VMworld next week. At some point in the recent past he was sitting on a plane beside Dan Farber of ZDNet and had this to say:

The biggest misconception is server consolidation. It was the first big application in the enterprise. Part of the problem with being the first successful application is that it misses a lot of the benefits. A virtualization layer is a different way of thinking about hardware, and server consolidation is just one tiny sliver of it.

People deploying virtualization infrastructure now view hardware differently–you have a pool of resources, virtual machine units, and you allow the infrastructure to map onto computation. If you need more capacity, just add more hardware.

He goes on to talk about capitalizing on software services, the TCO of automation and 'utility' computing, and the changing role of the OS. A good teaser for the keynotes at VMworld, and worth reading.

(via Virtualization Daily)