CAM work on the NASA space station Freedom. He later moved over to large system design while working on a government contract and subsequently worked for a messaging and security startup company in Silicon Valley, taking it public in the mid-1990s. After starting his own consulting firm, he began working at his first large financial firm. Seven or eight years later, he landed at his current company.

Allen Stewart is a Principle Program Manager Lead in the Window Server Division at Microsoft. He began his career working on Unix and Windows operating systems as a system programmer and then moved on to IBM, where he worked on Windows systems

a computer hardware and software emulation company.

Steve Bourne is chair of the ACM Professions Board. He is a former president of ACM and Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Queue editorial advisory board. A fellow alumnus with Simon Crosby, Bourne received his Ph.D. from Trinity College, Cambridge. Bourne held management roles at Cisco, Sun, DEC, and SGI and currently is CTO at El Dorado Ventures, where he advises the firm on their technology investments.

 

steve BouRne: So I’m in this small-to medium-size business (SMB) shop. You have just told me that I have to balance out the disk and the network with

Xen technology built in, and is one of HP’s embedded hypervisors. It’s the perfect mid-market product.

Virtualization today is not a real “market” and will not be until there are multiple independent, economically successful vendors. There is one very successful vendor today, and my hat’s off to VMware. However, its success is equivalent to the TCP/IP stack vendors of the early 1990s, before the stack became a commodity. But things are about to change because until now nobody else has played. The change is that the core value proposition is about to become free.

With Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor virtual machine (VM) platform current-

steve Bourne

integration on Wall Street. After IBM, Stewart joined Microsoft, where for the first six years he worked as an architect in the newly formed Financial Services Group. He then moved into the Windows Server Division Engineering organization to work on Windows Server releases. His primary focus is virtualization technologies: hardware virtualization, virtualization management, and application virtualization. Stewart is a Microsoft Certified Architect and is on the Board of Directors of the Microsoft Certified Architect Program.

Steve Herrod is the CTO of VMware, where he’s worked for seven years. Before VMware, Herrod worked in Texas for companies such as EDS and Bell Northern Research. Earlier in his career Herrod attended school with Mendel Rosenblum, the founder of VMware, and then worked for TransMeta,

mache creeger

 

my CPUs. This is all very complicated. What am I going to do next year?

Gustav: If you want to implement high up in the service stack today, you should choose VMware. It’s the one vendor that sells a fully integrated solution. If you’re an SMB with 20 people, want maximum flexibility, and want a single-vendor solution, it’s VMware. Because to Simon’s earlier point, right now they’re trying to sell cars; they are not trying to sell engines.

simon cRosBy: No, SMBs should choose Citrix XenServer, HP ProLiant Select Edition, which is an entirely HP-branded product. It is an integrated virtualization solution that is part of ProLiant Server, entirely packaged and managed by HP VMM (Virtual Machine Manager), which manages Microsoft, VMware, and XenServer today. It’s got the bundled HP toolset included, our

allen stewart

 

ly at $28 and my company’s Xen hypervisor being free, the price of a hypervisor is heading toward free. If you look at HP’s embedded hypervisor offering using our product, it is an incredible value proposition. That same product has more functionality than what made VMware their first $500 million of revenue. While VMware has had the benefit of market lead and brand presence, HP has knocked the value proposition out of the park. Is Citrix with XenServer an independent viable competitor against VMware? Yes, but that’s a tough slog. Enabling companies to create alterative products like Citrix XenServer, HP ProLiant Select Edition greatly expands customer choice for a wide range of market needs.

steve heRRoD: If you’re an SMB with one thousand employees or less—and 70% of our customers are what we de-