distributed systems. Early in his career, Gustav wrote assembler code for telephone switches and did CAD/CAM work on the NASA space station Freedom. He later moved 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 principal program manager in the Windows Server Division at Microsoft. He began his career working on Unix and Windows operating systems as a system programmer and then moved to IBM, where he worked on Windows systems 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. 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 has worked for seven years. Prior to that, he worked for EDS and Bell Northern Research. Earlier in his career he studied with Mendel Rosenblum, the founder of VMware, at Stanford and then worked for TransMeta, 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 technology investments.
BOURNE I’m in this SMB (small- to medium-size business) shop. You have just told me that I have to balance out the disk and the network with 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 Crosby’s earlier point, right now they’re trying to sell cars; they are not trying to sell engines.
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 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 hats 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 VM platform currently at $28 and Citrix’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 its first $500 million of revenue. While VMware has had the benefit
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