Getting real results from virtual machines
Published: 21 Oct 2005 14:35 BST
...the x86 architecture, they put no support for virtualisation in it because everybody thought that was something for the mainframes. VMware looked and said CPUs have gotten so fast, memory and disks have gotten so cheap, and there's full distributed networking and file systems, so the time is right to revisit this. In fact, the first project we called Disco because it, too, was something from the early '70s, but we modernised it and invented a lot of new functionality and brought it to commodity systems.
With VMware's software, an operating system or higher-level software thinks it's talking to a processor, but VMware software intercepts those commands and juggles the demands of multiple partitions?
Yes, the operating system thinks it owns the whole machine, it thinks it's talking to an x86 processor. Wherever we can, we let the instructions go directly to the hardware. Where we have to, we intercept them and [share hardware] resources.
For a long time, x86 chips couldn't do this. Now, all of a sudden Intel and AMD are putting in virtualisation features — Virtualisation Technology in the case of Intel, Pacifica in the case of AMD. How does that change things?
I'll just say we went to those companies right when we started and said, "Would you please add this support?" We knew it would make [VMware software] run better. So this is something we're very excited about and very supportive of. They're adding support for virtualisation so it will run even faster and be a little bit simpler to do.
But with VMware, there's a performance hit?
It varies on the workload. If it's a very CPU-intensive thing it can be as little as 1 percent to 2 percent. On average maybe it's 15 percent.
We now have some open source competition for you guys through the project of Xen, and Microsoft has arrived on the scene through its acquisition of Connectix. What's changed for you?
It's a huge testament to the value of having this virtualisation layer, and in that sense we find it really exciting. Microsoft, right now, is on a hosted product where you already have an operating system sitting there. They've said that they're going to move to an architecture, like our ESX Server, that's hypervisor-based. We hope to partner with Microsoft. We think we do great things for Windows and helping them bring Windows into the data centre, and we think this is a big universe. Then there's the open source [Xen]. For customers, it's not something you can use.
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