Getting real results from virtual machines

...widely proliferated x86 machines, and depending on the power of the server, they can get a 10-to-1, 4-to-1 reduction in the number of servers they need. Or they can stop that proliferation and contain it better. And beforehand, to bring a new service online you have to go order the machine, install it in the server room, get it network-connected, make sure the power is there — it can be a multi-month process. Post-VMware, all they do is keep pre-built images of different software services like SQL Server, and when someone needs that service, they just find some excess capacity somewhere and deploy it.

So what's the penalty? Why doesn't everybody do this?
Actually, what we were finding is that for people who use it, it's become the default way that they run their x86 workloads.

But not everybody is doing this. Is it fair to say the bulk of the customers at this point are the big guys: pharmaceuticals, oil and gas...
On the desktop, we have millions of customers at this point; on the server, probably 20,000-plus enterprise server customers.

I was talking to one person a little while back who has hundreds of x86 servers. I asked about VMware, and he said it's too expensive. It's cheaper to buy a new Intel server than a VMware server license and he wasn't worried about buying servers that might be underutilised.
That's a customer that only wants to use a product to do server consolidation. They don't want to use any of the other advantages around provisioning, disaster recovery, fault tolerance, load balancing, serviceability. This is exactly the customer we faced from the first launch of the server product almost four years ago. We priced our product actually to be slightly cheaper than buying more servers. That was how we came to our pricing, because that was the only value people initially saw. But when you add up the power savings, the space savings, the hardware costs, and some of the software licences, you do come out [paying] less. Then when you add in all the other functionality I just listed, the ROI is immediate and large.

So using virtualisation to run multiple independent operating systems on the same computer is not new. It's something that Unix servers have been able to do for a while and that mainframes have been able to do for decades. Why is it that it took so long to arrive on computers using x86 chip on Intel?
Yes, IBM came out with this in the late 1960s, early 1970s on the mainframe. People are doing it today for some of the same reasons. When [Intel] came out with...

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