... the value to the customer and move the industry forward together. You start needing standards. We'll be 8 years old in January and we have a lot of experience, and we see some of the directions we think are architecturally suboptimal. So we're taking what we believe are the interfaces, the standards that will allow the whole industry to work together on this in a productive way, and we're opening them up and sharing them with the industry. We don't see any reason why we won't be working with Xen and Microsoft.
I talked to Xen and I talked to Microsoft and they didn't seem to have any interest in adopting your standards.
Yeah, I don't understand why that wouldn't be, given the depth of experience we have, the years of shipping product, working with customers, the fact that we've built, over the years, three different architectures for this virtualisation technology. I think we understand what works quite well, and we're being open and no-strings-attached about how we share this with the world.
Perhaps if you're as powerful as Microsoft and have the ability to set a different standard, that would undermine [VMware's] market power. Whereas, if Microsoft adopted your standard for the underlying technology, that would serve to cement VMware's leadership by making what has been a de facto standard into an industry standard. If Microsoft comes up with some different standard, ships it with every version of Longhorn Server, maybe that will become the de facto standard instead.
I don't think that's the most productive for the industry, and I don't think it's the ideal scenario for the customers. I believe that everybody is going to win if we all work together on these standards. Microsoft has shown in recent years that they're more interested in doing what the customers want. It would be great if Microsoft would work with us on that.
Why didn't you do the standards move earlier?
Nobody came to us and asked us to do these things; this was a proactive thing on our own part. I think IBM and some of our partners are very standards oriented.
I was talking to a server executive at HP, the largest x86 server maker. He said the base virtualisation layer that lets you run multiple operating systems should be free. Do you agree?
Whatever you sell, you want to get enough money to invest in R&D. In VMware we have...
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Talkback
Me thinks that the future of virtual machines (as in virtual workspace) is in being able to function as a gadget for web-based portals. Meaning, someone connects and authenticates to a web based portal and that makes it possible to open up a virtual machine (within the web browser) in which a (not web based yet) application can do its thing.
Me also thinks that as the price for hardware and software licences goes down the business case for virtual machines (as in virtual servers) will become less attractive. Given also that, like it or not, virtual machines do add to the complexity and risk management factors by violating the proven rule: Keep It Simple, Stupid. As in: favour the option that lets you achieve the same with less components. Murphy can tell you why. On the other hand: working fallback capabilities and diversity help ensure business continuity in the longer run.
Other things to keep in mind: there are always more ways then one to achieve goals. Including options that would enable to use existing hardware for a couple of more years and just add what you're lacking in one creative way or the other..
My advise would be to know what you have overall and how it works (A), know what you need overall and working how some time from now (B), figure out at least two ways to get from A to B in a certain level of detail (because certain details matter in IT and most of those are not technical in nature), choose, plan the work, work the plan and stick to it.
If however you find along the way that things don't work out as pictured then don't be afraid to rediscover A and B again because most organizations learn the most along the way. Seldom do they get it right the first time. So build in room for such events beforehand.