VMware's Greene Unfazed By Microsoft Push Into Virtualization

VMware on Tuesday said its software won't support other virtual-machine environments, which would apparently include the Viridian hypervisor Microsoft plans to add to Windows Server 2008 next year.

During a question and answer session with reporters at her company's VMWorld user conference in San Francisco, Diane Greene, president and chief executive of VMware, said other hypervisors were incapable of taking advantages of all the services in VMware's product portfolio.

"Our hypervisor has so much more functionality that it wouldn't make sense to manage a hypervisor that doesn't come close," Greene said.

VMware offers software that includes capabilities for managing, backing up, and migrating virtual machines. Rather than support third-party hypervisors, VMware is working with Microsoft, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and XenSource on an open specification that would make it possible to run a virtual machine on any vendor's hypervisor, Greene said.

Meanwhile, Microsoft plans to offer virtualization as a feature of the Windows operating system. The software maker has said it expects to add the Viridian hypervisor to Windows Server 2008 within six months after the OS ships, which was scheduled for next February.

VMware, however, believes virtualization technology should be embedded in the hardware, not the operating system. To accomplish that, VMware on Monday introduced the next generation of its hypervisor, called ESX Server 3i, which Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and NEC have said they would use to build future virtualization-enabled servers. In addition, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel are building technology into their microprocessors to boost performance of virtualization environments.

Asked whether she was concerned with competing against Microsoft on hypervisors, Greene pointed out that "well over 80%" of VMware's revenues come from non-hypervisor software. "We've shifted our revenue model," she said.

Market researchers say Microsoft has a long ways to go if it wants to overtake VMware's more than 70% of the market in sales of virtualization technology.

On other topics, Greene said she did not expect compatibility problems between VMware technology and the separate virtualization platforms being built by AMD and Intel. "We work very closely with both Intel and AMD, and we have a very strong engineering relationship," she said. VMware is working with the vendors to develop migration models for taking software across the different processors.

Storage vendor EMC, which controls VMware, spun off 10% of the latter company's shares last month in a stock offering that saw the share price rise by more than 75%, making it the biggest opening day gain for a stock so far this year. Asked whether she now regretted selling VMware to EMC, Greene said, no, adding that "It's been a really successful outcome."

"The only difference would have been the money for some people, including myself," she said.

VMware on Tuesday announced that it had acquired Dunes Technologies, a Swiss company that sells software for managing virtual machines in corporate data centers. Asked whether more acquisitions were planned, Greene said it was possible, depending on the future technology VMware would need to build out its platform. "We don't anticipate a large acquisition, but like I said, acquisitions are an opportunistic business, and you keep your eyes and ears open," she said. "(But) off the top of my head, I don't see a large acquisition."