VMware and the Future of Virtualization

Perhaps no other company has had as big an impact on the IT industry in the past decade as VMware. From its humble beginnings in 1998, VMware has grown into a multibillion-dollar global enterprise that has fundamentally altered the landscape of business computing, even taking a lead in reducing power consumption by businesses. (For information about VMware’s work in green computing, see the sidebar “Need to Save Money? Build Green and Virtualize,” page 36.) Fresh from its tenth anniversary (and the ninth anniversary of its first product, VMware Workstation 1.0), the company looks poised for a future of continued growth.

Looming on the horizon, however, are dark clouds imprinted with a Microsoft logo and shaped like a Windows-Server-2008–with–Hyper-V product box. Can VMware fend off Microsoft’s delayed entry into the virtualization arena and retain its dominant, well-earned leadership position in the market? I spoke with VMware President and CEO Diane Greene to ask about VMware’s strategy for the future and how it intends to keep a step ahead of Microsoft.

James: In 1998, virtualization was about creating an abstraction layer between hardware and software, then it quickly grew into server consolidation and testing. Now we’re seeing many different types of virtualization in the market. From your perspective, what areas of virtualization are experiencing a lot of growth right now?

Greene: We recently took a hard look at that and realized that a good way to give a context to [the different types of virtualization] was to compare them with the phases customers go through when they deploy virtualization.

The first thing people realized—and this happened when we launched Workstation 1.0—was that “Now I can separate my software from the hardware. I can have multiple copies of a working software configuration that I can clone and maintain libraries of.” It also was a very valuable way to run Windows with Linux on the same machine; it was also a very valuable way to do test and development for any possible configuration.

The next thing that happened was people realized “Oh, OK; I don’t have to run just one application per server anymore, because the software is now separate from the server and isolated and I can tax that server up to 80 to 85 percent utilization with these virtual machines, instead of running at 5 to 15 percent utilization in the one-application-per-server model.” That was the server consolidation phase.

The next thing was, now that software is separated and can run with other software in these virtual machines, VMware invented VMotion to move software around dynamically across physical boundaries. Now all of a sudden you may say “OK, now I can actually take my hardware resources—my CPUs, my memory, my disks, and my network—and I can aggregate them all to get even better utilization. I can do it dynamically so I can service things when they’re broken without any interruption, I can dynamically allocate and add capacity when I need it to maintain response time, and I can also do much better high availability because I have pooled resources to take advantage of.” That was the aggregation phase.

Then, all of a sudden you’d look at this and you’d say, “Any application I put in this virtual machine inherits all of these wonderful properties, and I get all the properties in one uniform, consistent way.” You then realize that you can manage and automate how this software runs. I can, for instance, group software together and treat it as a unit for testing and development. I can manage the images and the disks and the process by which I go through testing and into staging and production. I can do a whole automation of software lifecycle management. Or a completely different example is you can now automate how an application or a set of applications go through disaster recovery. You can automate the scripting of that so the configuration of your DR process, instead of being in some old crusty playbook, can be encapsulated in an automated process that takes advantage of VMs. So then you can test it in production and you can let it run. That’s the automation and management phase.

We see a fifth phase that has to do with cloud computing, what we call the liberate phase. That’s where you can, within your data centers, have multiple data centers and treat them like a cloud because the VMs can move around. You can also have external data centers, hosting providers, and cloud providers that you can use. You can also secure and monitor your VMs both on-premise and offpremise.

James: Some statistics show that only 10 percent or so of servers are being virtualized. Do you have a timeframe for when you think the 100-percent-virtualized IT infrastructure will become a reality?

Greene: It’s always hard to predict how quickly humans move to do something. We were overly optimistic that they would see immediately how valuable this was and move to it. Even though we have more than a hundred thousand customers using this software—all of the fortune 100—there’s still a measured pace to which they roll it out, even though they are reducing the number of administrators it takes to run their software, getting better resource utilization—all the advantages of doing more with less. We’re in a cycle now where there’s increased pressure to do more with less, so that may push people to move more quickly. There’s also much wider awareness of it. Someone recently pointed me to an incredible James Fallows piece on using our Mac Fusion product and how it just worked—he waxed eloquent on the value of it. When you get the mainstream [press] talking about virtualization, it’s clear that [virtualization has become] widely accepted.

We’re also embedding a small-footprint virtualization platform hypervisor [VMware ESXi] that’s coming with servers, so that will also further accelerate the [move to virtualization]. To make a long story short, it’s hard to predict. For a crisp answer to your question it could be anywhere from the next couple years to the next 8 to 10 years.

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