* VMware exec speaks on VMware’s role in the enterprise
At the recent EMC’s Technology Summit in New Orleans, I had a chance to get an update on how and where VMware’s virtualization software is being used. VMware, which was acquired by EMC in late 2003, is being run as an independent subsidiary. I spoke with Karthik Rau, director of product management for VMware.
Here’s a brief, edited portion of our conversation:
NW: What percent of servers do you think are virtualized?
Rau: We believe right now that roughly 5% to 10% of the server workloads on x86 servers will be virtualized. We have seen a tremendous uptake in adoption over the last 12 to 18 months. Organizations are looking at virtualization as a standard technology layer in their data centers. Server consolidation is driving this adoption.
We’ve also seen much broader adoption of virtualization for other solutions like disaster recovery, particularly when you talk about integrating it with some of the storage area networking replication products.
NW: In addition to consolidation, what other areas do organizations use your products in?
Rau: A lot of organizations look at virtualization as a containment strategy – by default, all new workloads are being deployed as virtual machines. Another key area is test and development; we have a lot of customers who are using our products to streamline their test and development lifecycles. With virtual machines, companies can build and rebuild environments and share configurations with multiple developers. The third area where VMware is used is for business continuity – a lot of our customers are leveraging the fact that virtual machines are hardware-independent. They can use SAN replication technologies to copy virtual machines from one location to another on a completely heterogeneous set of hardware. The last category is desktops.
