Q&A: VMware eyes 'real' utility computing

Virtualization firm's president looks to exploit 'de facto standard' status.

VMware created the market for virtualizing x86-based servers when it introduced products in 2001. But the company, which EMC acquired in 2003, is no longer the only game in town. In recent years, competitors — including Microsoft and the open source Xen virtualization technology — have emerged as viable options for enterprises looking to slice and dice industry-standard servers. Network World Senior Editor Jennifer Mears spoke with VMware President Diane Greene recently to find out where VMware is heading. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation:

VMware is pushing beyond its roots in server virtualization and moving into management of virtualized servers, which seems to be where the market in general is heading.

Let me stop you there. It’s really funny because I keep correcting people now when they say server virtualization, because even in our hypervisor [the base software that enables multiple operating systems to run on a single physical server], we do server, storage and network virtualization. And I don’t categorize what we’re moving into as management. When I say systems management, I’m thinking Tivoli, BMC, CA, HP OpenView and that kind of stuff.

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VMware created the market for virtualizing x86-based servers when it introduced products in 2001. But the company, which EMC acquired in 2003, is no longer the only game in town. In recent years, competitors — including Microsoft and the open source Xen virtualization technology — have emerged as viable options for enterprises looking to slice and dice industry-standard servers. Network World Senior Editor Jennifer Mears spoke with VMware President Diane Greene recently to find out where VMware is heading. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation:

VMware is pushing beyond its roots in server virtualization and moving into management of virtualized servers, which seems to be where the market in general is heading.

Let me stop you there. It’s really funny because I keep correcting people now when they say server virtualization, because even in our hypervisor [the base software that enables multiple operating systems to run on a single physical server], we do server, storage and network virtualization. And I don’t categorize what we’re moving into as management. When I say systems management, I’m thinking Tivoli, BMC, CA, HP OpenView and that kind of stuff.

So how does Infrastructure 3, which does bring more advanced management features, illustrate where VMware is heading?

VMware Infrastructure 3 is the world’s first truly distributed system where things are automated. It’s more than the hypervisor, but VMware ESX Server got moved forward with four-way SMP, it got a whole distributed file system. We also released distributed resource scheduling and a lot of other new features. What we have the ability to do now is allocate resources by business groups.

Once you aggregate your hardware resources, you can take that and allocate a certain amount of CPU power, memory, disk and network to a group of virtual machines, and it will be guaranteed those resources. If it’s not using them, other virtual machines will be able to use those resources.

And the functionality is hierarchical. So, within that group, you can subdivide it further. So you could have some of the resources for your staging and testing and the rest of your resources for production, for example.

Another thing you might do is say you’re running out of headroom in your pool of resources, you can bring online a new set of resources — say, a new server. The system will detect that and automatically rebalance it.