Server platforms Toolkit

Getting real results from virtual machines

Stephen Shankland CNET News.com

Published: 21 Oct 2005 14:35 BST

For years, VMware president Diane Greene led a company in an obscure part of the industry called virtualisation. But all of the sudden, virtualisation is a hot subject, and she no longer has the market to herself.

But as Microsoft's virtualisation strategy and its open source competitor called Xen both mature, VMware, an EMC subsidiary, is responding. At its second user conference, held this week, the company announced new versions of its core products — ESX Server 3 and VirtualCentre 2 — that show the company focus moving from making a single server more efficient to making a large group of them more efficient.

Another change at VMware is an effort to make its interfaces into standards that its rivals can use — potentially simplifying affairs in the software realm but also solidifying VMware's lead.

VMware's software lets an x86 computer be divided into separate virtual machines, each with its own copy of an operating system. The company started with workstations, enabling programmers to simulate the interaction of several machines or debug new software in a protected environment. But now, most of the company's revenue comes from servers.

Changes are in the offing. "VMware is a premium-priced start-up. They charged because they could. No one else was even close," Jay Bretzmann, director of IBM's high-performance Intel server division, said in a recent interview. He believes that the pricing model is starting to weaken with the arrival of competition but adds, "VMware is the de facto standard, the thing we're shipping today, and our customers are very happy about it."

And the company continues to grow. EMC reported on Wednesday that for the third quarter of 2005, VMware generated $101m in revenue, a 67 percent increase over the $61m it generated a year ago (£57m compared to £35m).

ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland discussed the changes with Greene at the company's headquarters in California.

Q: To start out, why don't you describe what your company does?
A: VMware produces virtualisation software. What that means is we take a physical x86-based system and we provide the multiple isolated, movable partitions that you can run operating systems with their applications in. In terms of what the customer gets, they get a way to drive utilisation from, say, 15 percent, on up to 85 percent. They get very cost-effective ways to do disaster recovery, high availability, provisioning — all sorts of system-level services.

Pick a typical customer. What's their life before and after VMware? What changes?
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