I had the chance to hear VMware's co-founder, Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, speak during one of the keynote presentations at VMworld 2006. His discussion about the future of virtualization was fantastic! Even more awe inspiring was getting the chance to actually meet with him, shake hands, and talk about virtualization with him during my book signing at the VMworld Company Store. The man is a true visionary and yet very I had the chance to hear VMware’s co-founder, Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, speak during one of the keynote presentations at VMworld 2006. His discussion about the future of virtualization was fantastic! Even more awe inspiring was getting the chance to actually meet with him, shake hands, and talk about virtualization with him during my book signing at the VMworld Company Store. The man is a true visionary and yet very down to Earth. TechWorld was also able to catch up with Dr. Rosenblum at the show, and asked him a number of interesting questions. TechWorld wanted to find out where he saw the company taking this fast evolving technology. Some of my favorite questions and answers follow:Q: What combination of factors has made virtualisation the hot topic of today? A: A lot of the excitement around virtualisation stems from problems in the current software environment – a combination of modern operating systems and applications. People weren’t happy with issues such as reliability and security. While the OS is supposed to be in charge of the hardware, people spend too much time managing them, and they’re not robust enough to run multiple applications. What was needed was a thinner layer to do the mapping onto the hardware resources. For example, you could imagine a distributed OS that allows free flow of information between applications, or one that stops bad processes bringing down the entire OS – but we evolved not to do that. And some of the older technology was too slow – now the hardware has arrived. Q: What’s the most promising development outside of VMware that you believe can or will aid VMware’s stated aim of virtualising everything? A: Finally we’re getting hardware support for virtualisation – we can only do so much in software to get resources treated as a pool – with boxes connected by faster networks that’s exciting. We’ve never done anything in hardware, only software. Virtualisation is an incredibly useful technology – virtualisation will be pushed by partners from shops that service SMBs and want to be able to build a virtual infrastructure. And there are vendors who want to use the technology to improve security. Q: What are the barriers to running 3D graphics in a VM – and when do you anticipate overcoming these? A: We can do some of this in software – need to wait until the ATIs and nVidias see virtualisation as important. I know they’re working on it, and today’s GPUs are like mini-supercomputers. The technology is not that different from Silicon Graphics old systems with multiple graphics cards – it’s just about putting the pieces together. The good news is that even Microsoft is helping by the way it’s specifying the graphics level – you can read the state out of the chip. As for timing, that depends on graphics people. It’s an example of what we’d like to see – let the hardware architects figure out how to make it happen. Q: Your model seems to be to keep ahead of Microsoft by scattering a pile of free software in your wake as you push the technology forward. A: Want to avoid being in a niche – we’re better than the competition, who can’t do what we do so we can charge a premium price. Guided by the notion of the virtual appliance model, we needed a free player to seed the VA market. Our sales people hate it because it’s free but developers like to impact a lot of people so that’s a good thing for them. But then, they also like to have stock options that go up in value. Read the entire interview, here. TechWorld has a number of other great questions and answers. Software Development