Immediately after the release of new Virtual Infrastructure 3, virtualization.info had the pleasure to reach Raghu Raghuram, Vice President of Platform Products at VMware, to ask him details about just launched products, recent Akimbi acquisition announcement, secret VMware Integrity product, planned presence in the Apple operating system and further steps in virtualization market leader strategy. From his answers a revelation comes out: VMware is going to partially support Microsoft virtualization technologies.

virtualization.info: The VI3 beta program has been highly successful, even involving enterprise class products, often with complex testing infrastructures to setup and maintain. Why do you think the beta program received so much participation?

Raghu Raghuram: Two reasons:

• VI3 breaks new ground in terms of capability and delivers full infrastructure virtualization. Customers were very eager to experience the new functionality and understand how they can benefit from it.
• Virtualization has become mission-critical. More than 90% of our customers run in production, 2/3rds are relying upon our products for disaster recovery and over half our customers use VMotion everyday to minimize planned downtime or respond to load fluctuations in the data center. So these customers want to be sure that the new software works well in their environment and is robust enough for their production needs. We were very gratified that an overwhelming percentage of the beta customers declared the product to be robust and high quality before we shipped the final bits.

VI: Looking at VMTN Forums the most visited thread about VI3 is called "Comparing ESX 2.5 to 3.0 performance". On it some customers are reporting a performance increase of up to 50%. Can you confirm such result? Are they achievable only with special hardware configurations?

RR: We have done a huge amount of work in increasing the performance and scalability attributes across the board. It is great to see that customers are experiencing the improvements. An upcoming blog from Steve Herrod, our VP of R&D describes some of these changes and improvements. As for specific numbers, they depend upon the type of workload and hardware configurations. We are committed to being the leader in this space not only in terms of functionality and robustness, but also scale and performance. So you will see continuing emphasis on these areas.

VI: A lot of confusion has been generated around the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) option in new licensing model. Customers buying the VI3 Starter Edition believe they are loosing the famous VMware file system. Would you clarify this point?

RR: VMFS provides two distinct set of benefits. First, as a Virtual Machine Filesystem, it is optimized for storing VM disks as files. This capability is available across all product editions. Second, VMFS also serves as a distributed file system that connects to Fiber-channel SAN storage. VMFS, in this mode, offers capabilities for volume management, handling heterogeneous storage arrays, capacity expansion, on-disk locking to enable concurrent access by multiple ESX Servers. This aspect of VMFS, or clustered VMFS as we call it, is critical enabler of advanced functionality like VMotion, DRS with SANs. Clustered VMFS is available with VMware Infrastructure Standard and Enterprise.

VI: A significant objection to VI3 release relates storage: in several press articles customers' interviews underlined how VMware strategy is still unable to address a compelling need of flexibility in storage management. What do you think about this point of view?

RR: VI3 actually does advance the capabilities for storage management through the support of SMI-S APIs in ESX Server 3.0. Our strategy is to leverage and drive open industry standards for management of virtualized infrastructures and we will continue to do that for storage space as well.

VI: The new VI3 brings in powerful capabilities but also more complexity. Is VMware going to renew its certification program and training offering? When we can expect new courses?

RR: Absolutely. You will find the details at http://www.vmware.com/certification

VI: The biggest news these days apart the VI3 launch and availability is the Akimbi acquisition. Slingshot technology will be released as stand-alone product, available for both VMware ESX Server and Server, or as a module for VirtualCenter?

RR: Akimbi technology will be incorporated into a standalone software lifecycle management product, available for both VMware Infrastructure and VMware Server.

VI: Many Akimbi customers are now asking what will happen to the Microsoft part of the product. VMware is going to shutdown it as expected? Or VirtualCenter is going to expand its capability managing other virtualization platforms?

RR: VMware will support Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 in its software lifecycle management product.

VI: Another hot news involves something virtualization.info has discovered last week, dubbed VMware Integrity. Can you tell us something about this one?

RR: We've been proactively evangelizing the value of virtualization in providing better solutions for security - it happens to be one of the primary areas of research of our Chief Scientist Mendel Rosenblum. We've got many interesting technologies in our labs that we believe will change the way people manage security just like VMotion changed the way people think about server availability, but at this point we don't have anything more specific to comment on.

VI: A very interesting product VMware is not updating since a while is ACE. Can customers expect something new within this year or the product is going to be dismissed?

RR: We are excited by the potential of ACE to improve desktop manageability and security. We are hard at work on the next major version. As the product is readied for beta we will offer more details.

VI: Parallels Inc., the last company entered in the virtualization market, just released a desktop virtualization product for new Apple Mac OS X for Intel architectures, beating any competitor on time. Customers are a bit surprised the market leader, founding its success on a high quality desktop product like VMware Workstation, is still mum about a possible presence in the Apple operating system. Isn't VMware interested in Apple market?

RR: With Apple switching to x86-based processors, robust and proven virtualization capabilities for Apple users is an interesting opportunity. We have stated that we do have VMware running on Mac OS X in our labs - stay tuned for future announcements in this area.

VI: A last question about Microsoft competition. Where VMware will be at the time Microsoft will release Windows Server Virtualization and Virtual Machine Manager, 2 years from now?

RR: The first generation of virtualization was single-server partitioning. The second generation of virtualization provided a layer of management for Virtual Machines. With VI3, we have entered the third generation of virtualization. Virtualization has evolved from being a static single-server partitioning technology to a distributed, infrastructure-wide virtualization technology that provides the foundation for next generation systems infrastructure. The next generation systems infrastructure will harness a collection of industry-standard hardware components and deliver the utilization, reliability, availability and security that was previously possible only with million-dollar mainframes. VMware's mission is to enable this next generation of systems infrastructure even as other vendors focus on basic partitioning and management two years from now.