Познавательное интервью с Raghu Raghuram (vice president of products and solutions, VMware Inc.) опубликовано в апрельском номере Redmond Magazine.

Ключевые идеи:

• гипервизор с точки зрения VMware должен являться частью железа, как это сделано на "больших" машинах, а не операционной системы, как предлагает Microsoft. Это позволяет взять любой сервер и сразу включить его в виртуальную инфраструктуру гетерогенного ЦОДа, в котором могут быть десятки ОС.
• VMware помогает строить ИТ-инфраструктуру в виде общего для всех пользователей сервиса, доступного по запросам со стороны бизнеса.
• Основой такого сервиса может стать ЦОД, архитектура которого построена на технологии виртуализации…

Ключевые цитаты:

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…

Do you see yourself as both an infrastructure and applications company, or will you just focus on infrastructure and let your partners take care of the applications?
We don’t see ourselves as an applications vendor. Our job is to help customers get to this vision of running IT as a shared utility…

Can you talk about the significance of your announcements at the VMworld show in Cannes, France, last month, and how they move your strategies forward?
We’ve said that virtualization isn’t just a solution for providing hardware savings. Fundamentally, it’s an architecture for the data center helping users solve problems that previously were very difficult to do. These problems have more to do with how you manage and automate the data center, how you make the data center more secure, and how you make the data center more available and flexible.

We see the data center as a self-managing, flexible utility. This is why we announced a set of automation and management products that make the virtualized environment highly automated, enabling systems administrators to manage a substantially larger number of virtual instances with the resources that they have. Most of our [user] companies are thinking about IT services, not about a single application. It’s about a SOA delivering an IT service… 

Redmond | Redmond Report Article: Driving VMware