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VMware's geek lady Diane Greene interviewed!



No doubt 2005 has been a great year for VMware and let me tell you 2006/2007/2008 will be (in my words) golden years for VMware. Like any ultimate geek club, VMware will lead and stay the leader.

There have been talks about VMware cutting lose from the storage giant EMC, although the heavyweight marketing backing is not something you'd want to get rid off. And given the fact that MS has it's own plans for it's Virtual Server, one should not forget sometimes riding the camel in a desert is a better deal than walking it alone and running out of fuel.

Anyways those are speculations and maybe someday VMware will decide to go it's own way or may not...



Anyways here a few excerpts...


How do you see the technology coming together between VMware and the management tools and devices that are tying into virtualization?
Greene: We have an existing SDK out there for managing our virtual machines. IBM Director, HP's virtualization management software, CA's Unicenter and BMC's Patrol all have management software that can manage virtual machines and a host of smaller software companies as well.

One of our first participants in community source, Mellanox, is putting InfiniBand support for ESX Server. We've ported our software to run on [Intel's] VT and [Advanced Micro Devices'] Pacifica and the multi-core offerings, so we're making sure we work with the new offerings out of the chip vendors.

We've also announced support for paravirtualization.

What do you think will happen in 2006?
Greene: What I really see happening is that people are starting to fully appreciate what virtualization is all about. People have thought of it as a partitioning tool for server consolidation. But really, it goes so far beyond that. A lot of the biggest ROI [that] people are seeing is different from server consolidation.

What you see coming out of VMware is a full, distributed virtualization system where you can run clustered machines and load balance transparently between them. You can have automatic failover between virtual machines. You can have backup, management, security auditing and performance monitoring around a centralized groups of virtual machines.

It's changing how people can operate their systems on a whole new level, using the elegant abstraction of virtualization. When you are no longer tied to the physical hardware, you can now revisit all the things we do when we manage our machines and do them in a more powerful, distributed, transparent and autonomic way.

That's what you're going to see in 2006 from VMware and beyond. It's just huge ROI for people because of the constraints that go away once you've deployed those capabilities.

What are your biggest challenges for the company going forward?
Greene: Growing the company and scaling it has been a lot of work. Keeping up with all of the things we want to do for partners and customers is hard because the number of partners and customers is growing so rapidly. We work really hard to do everything they need from us. That is our No. 1 challenge. As we grow, continuing our pace of high quality products and innovation, which has so far been working well. That's really what we've been focused on. It's a large industry and there is huge opportunity from all kinds of angles. We've been doing nothing but thinking about it for the last eight years and see a lot of different places to go. We're pretty excited about it.



Check out all of this interview here

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