James: Microsoft executives we’ve spoken
to have said that “virtualization should be
a feature of the OS” and that “Windows is
an OS that’s adding a virtualization feature,
while VMware is a feature trying to become
an OS.” How would you respond to those
comments?
Greene: Virtualization is really revolutionizing
IT. It’s really changing how we
do everything. One of the ways it’s doing
that is because we now have completely separated the software from the hardware.
The way you do that is that you run the OS
and the application in a VM that you can
move around and that can be managed
completely separately. The traditional OS
as we know it is tied to the hardware in
a static fashion—it’s a highly constrained
environment. To extend an OS to include virtualization
would be to take one of the most
powerful aspects of virtualization and throw
it away. Virtualization is something that lets
you separate the hardware and the software,
so when you have a hypervisor embedded
in the hardware, you now have that power of
separation and ability to aggregate things and
automate things that you would not have if
you had the static tie to the hardware.
You mentioned that Microsoft wants the
OS to have virtualization as a feature. A huge
advantage of having a thin hypervisor—ESXi
is under 32MB—is that it is very reliable and
very secure. When you make it a feature of the
OS, your virtualization is only as reliable and
secure as your OS is. VMware has brought out
a new model—and brought it mainstream—
that lets people do things in a way that dramatically
improves how we manage, access,
and deliver our software.
James: I’ve heard from a number of readers
and colleagues who believe that VMware is
clearly ahead of Microsoft when it comes to
virtualization technology. Historically, Microsoft
might enter a new market with an inferior
product, but over time it continually updates
that product. Microsoft also leverages its
existing products to pressure competitors.
VMware is in a much stronger position than
companies such as Netscape, Novell, and
Digital Research were, but Microsoft might
eventually be where VMware is now.
Greene: VMware’s strategy and vision is to
partner with the industry to deliver increasingly
more valuable ways to manage and
deliver your compute environment—I think
we’ve been delivering on that phenomenally
well. What our customers are able to do with
our software just is amazing.
It’s not just that we’re ahead; it’s the value
that we’re delivering to customers. And how
much they love that value—they get software
that just works. On a very regular basis they
get [upgrades] that provide new functionality
and get even more value out of this revolutionary
way of doing things called virtualization. They’re now getting management and
automation. What do people want to do?
They want to build and quickly deploy applications
that are always available and always
responsive [and] that drive their business.
They don’t care where it comes from—if it
comes from a cloud, if it comes from a service,
if it comes from their internal data center—
they just want to drive their business.
What we’ve set out to do is to make that
very, very simple and let people do it the
way they intuitively want to without having
to worry whether they’re optimizing their
resources. They’re not worrying about failures;
they’re not worrying about not having
enough capacity when server load goes up.
VMware has continually delivered on
that promise with regular new products—
every year, every few months—and we’re
doing that with a very extensive ecosystem
of partners—we now have over 14,000 partners
and over 700 technology partners—and
our customers trust us. We’re giving them
very credible, useful, valuable products time
and time again. That’s why we have all the
Fortune 100 [as customers] and have 92
percent of the fortune 1000. We did a recent
survey—13,600 customers responded—and
98 percent told us they were happy with their
VMware deployment and had gotten the ROI
they needed.
I don’t know why someone would want
to wait and see when there’s a [virtualization]
solution that has some customers realizing a
positive ROI within a few months. As far as
where VMware is going in the future, we’ll
continue to work with our partners, build
out our ecosystem, and deliver an increasing
value to our customers. That strategy has
been working well.
James: On the systems management side,
Microsoft seems to be trying to leverage
its management capability on the physical
side with Microsoft System Center to go
to customers and say that it has a solution
that manages both physical and virtual systems.
VMware VirtualCenter does a lot with
VMs that Microsoft System Center Virtual
Machine Manager doesn’t. Given Microsoft’s
approach, would VMware ever consider
upgrading its products to include management
of physical machines? Or do you see
combining physical- and virtual-machine
management as a stopgap solution until we
get to a fully virtualized IT infrastructure?
Greene: A lot of our partners have very
excellent, well-tested, time-tested ways to
manage physical machines. VMware has
decided to take our 6,000-plus employees
and focus on virtualization management.
We don’t see a need for us to take into
account legacy management software, other
than working with partners to have very
clean APIs to integrate with their management
and consoles. That has worked very
successfully for our customers, and we don’t
see a reason for reinventing something that
is already there and works well, especially
when we can offer increasing functionally
in an area of future growth. So VMware will
increasingly offer management and automation
that exploits the power of virtualization,
and we’ll do that in conjunction with
our system vendor partners that manage
hardware.
James: Hyper-V isn’t out yet, but what
features do you believe VMware offers that
competitive products don’t?
Greene: VMware has a very broad portfolio
of products from the desktop to the data center,
all integrated, that simplify and automate
management of the desktop and data center.
Other companies are just coming out with
an entry level, 1.0 product that is just basic
virtualization. VMware gives our customers a
complete portfolio to manage, to [help them]
deploy their data center, while integrating the
desktop and server.
In terms of specific qualities of VMware,
[I think we offer] unbelievable quality. Our
products just work, and the quality is there.
We have customers telling us over and over
again about the quality of the product. That
quality is a very core focus of the company.
We already have a very broad portfolio to
simplify running and managing your data
center, a very rich roadmap, and an extremely
rich ecosystem of partners that we interoperate
with seamlessly.
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