Amazon uses virtualization in its EC2 cloud. Are they using VMware?
I can't comment on that, but I think the model that Amazon is doing is helping people to understand what's possible.
What's the biggest challenge for VMware this year?
If I had to identify one thing, we've definitely stepped up our communication this year. Part of that is being a public company. Part of that is explaining, as the noise has increased due to our expected arrival of competitors coming into the market, explaining the different category of value proposition we have.
What are the most innovative VMware customers doing with virtualization?
There are great innovations going on in the desktop and in the data center and even in the cloud. The desktop is used heavily in the health industry and the hospitals. There's Huntsville hospital [in Alabama], which uses thin clients on wheeled carts with the desktop hosted on a centralized server. They're using virtualized desktops so they can have wireless thin clients running around on hospital carts.
The US Marine Corps consolidated 300 data centers down to 30, and 100 mobile platforms, a data center in a box, that can go on a tank or what have you. With [virtual desktop software] VMware ACE, they can carry [desktops] on their thumb drives and deploy on any PC.
The National Security Agency, of course, has used it to provide different security levels on the same physical machine. They've been a customer of ours since 1999. They started out really early, we gave them our source code right away, they did a full audit of it. One of the first things they used it for was to isolate what people are doing because a single individual that has top security clearance needs to do different things at different security levels. [Previously], they had to have a different PC depending on how secure the data was. They were able to consolidate that onto a single machine made up of multiple virtual machines. Each virtual machine was encrypted and so forth and had a different security clearance level.
The VMsafe program you announced in February essentially opened your hypervisor to security vendors. Has anything innovative come out of that yet?
You'll see products over the next 18 to 24 months out of that. Once that comes out you'll see a new level of security, because instead of being either inside the operating system or out on the network, you're on a special very secure virtual machine that can aggregate what's going on in all the memory and CPU and operating system and network. Also, people won't need to install antivirus in the software anymore because you'll be able to put it in the container [the virtual server running the software]. In other words, you can control what goes in and out of a virtual machine. If there's a new virus you can update right there, you don't have to update the operating system or the application.
Do you think a virtual server today is more secure or less secure than a physical server?
I would say it's certainly as secure and in some ways more secure simply because the hypervisor is so small, so you can really secure the hypervisor. And a virtual machine container is as secure as the hardware.
