InformationWeek’s Charles Babcock interviews VMware founder Mendel Rosenblum. Stay turned for Mendel’s keynote Thursday morning — it’s always a fun ride. Link:
InformationWeek:
VMware put ESX Server on a weight loss plan to get it down from two
gigabytes to 32 megabytes in the just announced, embeddable, 3i
version. How did you do that?Rosenblum: We’ve
typically included a version of Red Hat Linux in ESX Server. That’s
because the hardware manufacturers put little embedded processors to
control the fans and other elements of their servers. They have agents
reporting on their operation. They wouldn’t write software that would
allow those processors to interface to ESX Server, but they had to do
it for Linux. So we shipped a full Red Hat operating system as our management console. …InformationWeek:
Will virtualization as a feature of the hardware become the dominant
way of distributing hypervisors, over, say, virtualization as a feature
of the operating system?Rosenblum: That’s been my
vision of how virtualization could be deployed in the industry. With
multi-core processors, it would be weird not to. There’d be too few
workloads that could run on them [and take advantage of all the
processing power] without virtualization.InformationWeek: What’s wrong with distributing virtualization as part of the operating system?
Rosenblum: The existing
modern operating systems will want to stay in their privileged position
and will bundle [virtualization] into the operating system. I think,
technically, the right way to do it is the way we’re doing in ESX
Server 3i, as an embedded feature in the hardware.
