Q&A: VMware vice president of server business Raghu Raghuram

Raghuram on beating Microsoft, green computing and future IT management skills

Raghu Raghuram sees virtualisation as a fundamental way to transform the datacentre

Raghu Raghuram has had years of experience in the industry, with spells at Netscape, AOL and latterly VMware. V3.co.uk caught up with him at VMworld 2009 to discuss the virtualisation market, the effects of green computing and the skills IT managers will need to keep their jobs in the future.

V3.co.uk: We've heard a lot about Microsoft and its moves within the virtualisation field. Can you outline the key differences between VMware's approach and Microsoft's?
Raghu Raghuram: We've got a couple of distinct differences in how we approach virtualisation and how Microsoft does that. Microsoft sees virtualisation as something that has to do with primarily partitioning a server and delivering the benefits associated with that.

We see virtualisation as a fundamental way to transform the datacentre; we see this as a datacentre platform that isn't just about servers but about storage, about networking, about management, about security. So that's the first difference.

The second difference is in terms of the capabilities and the solutions we deliver to the customer. Our solutions are not just about core server partitioning and server consolidation, it's about delivering disaster recovery, about delivering mobility into the cloud, about delivering development solutions and application delivery etc etc.

The third aspect is about the choice that customers have. So we are not talking about Microsoft's scenario of Hyper-V running with Windows and serving Windows applications. This is about a datacentre platform providing customers with extreme choice in a range of operating systems and applications and hardware, and even extending into the cloud and delivering not just an internal cloud but working with over 1,000 providers.

The last one is cost of ownership. Because we provide extreme scalability and deliver new technologies for resource management, networks and storage we're able to deliver on a cost-per-application basis more capabilities at less cost than Microsoft.

It does seem that Microsoft is tying in the operating system to its virtualisation. Is that a strategy that will work in the long term?
No. That's been a historic Microsoft strategy and in this case it works very clearly against customer interests because by definition it constrains the solution to be a very narrow partitioning solution that you add on to Windows as opposed to a datacentre solution. That's why we think that solution is flawed from the get-go.

The other interesting aspect of this is that every security vulnerability that affects the Microsoft operating system by implication will require you to look at your Hyper-V environment to see if there is impact as opposed to an operating system-independent solution.

Microsoft has a history of giving competitor products away free, as you saw at Netscape. Do you see VMware having a competitive advantage by being more up front about pricing? Yes. If you talk to customers, licence cost is one aspect of what they are looking at. They step back and say: 'hey, I have this problem. I have 100 physical machines and I want to convert them to 100 virtual machines. What is it going to mean in costing?' So it's the licence, it's the hardware, it's everything put together. So if you look at that on a cost-per-application basis - ultimately that's how customers look at these things - it turns out we're actually cheaper. That was not the case with Netscape.

Secondly we're talking about a very low level of datacentre foundational software. Customers are loath to switch that out at will because what happens when you change your datacentre foundational software is that there are a lot of processes in the datacentre to change. How you run your datacentre day to day will become very different in a VMware versus a non-VMware environment.

Thirdly there is a maturity aspect to the software. With consumer software you are willing to tolerate – you know it's beta software and I don't care. But with datacentre software, and especially virtualisation there may be 10 or 15 applications running on top of your software, so you better be darn sure that this thing is extremely robust, extremely battle-tested and that takes a long time.

Q&A: VMware vice president of server business Raghu Raghuram

Raghuram on beating Microsoft, green computing and future IT management skills

Intel's name is being bandied around a lot, but AMD is also targeting the virtualisation sector. Is there a difference between them, and should you be sticking to one or the other?
We work well with both. I think when [VMware chief executive] Paul [Maritz] is talking about Intel servers he's really talking about the architecture rather than the brand. It's the x86 architecture.

Clearly AMD does great products as well, and the history of those two companies is that they have been leapfrogging each other and keeping each other on their toes. Our customers tend to deploy both.

Pushing power management has been a major focus of this year's conference, but it hasn't been billed as green technology. Are people bothered about being green or is it just about saving costs?
I see varying degrees of both. The energy savings profoundly resonate, but in lots of countries that we operate in being green is a board-level topic. They all have to report back what they are doing by their green initiatives. That's certainly a factor as you go higher up the organisational chain.

In fact there are companies that measure their carbon footprint and in some cases virtualisation has a great effect on that footprint.

Some people here have been saying that the recession has been a good thing. Is that a reflection of what you are seeing?
It's all relative, right? Certainly customers, as they cut down on their projects, see virtualisation as one of the projects that is still left on the table.

At the same time they have tended to scale down on their virtualisation ambitions, doing just enough to get them the cost savings they need. So it's a combination of both.

There's been a lot of talk about how the nature of virtualisation changes the very nature of IT management. What advice would you give IT managers today about the skills they will need to ensure they have a job in 10 years' time?
Virtualisation is one of the key forces that is causing a sea-change in IT, especially at the infrastructure level. One of the notable things we see happening is the convergence of compute, storage and networking skills, especially as it pertains to infrastructure and to hardware itself.

So we think that the silos of these skills will change over the next few years to a point where you have to be good at all these domains in order to be an IT infrastructure person. That's number one.

Number two is that the levels of automation that you are applying to IT will progressively increase as well, so it's not just going to be about racking and stacking servers, it's going to be about provisioning progressively. So instead of IT skills you will need to manage the datacentre as a whole, being able to plan capacity and so on and so forth.