VMware's CEO talks Microsoft, security, EMC and cloud computing

Are there any problems people run into that are unique to virtual servers?

With products like ACE, where you can actually put security policies around the virtual machine, that actually takes it to a stronger level. You can have a desktop virtual machine not allowed to send anything to a printer or have to check in with a central server to make sure it's still valid and properly updated before you can operate it. You can add security policies around that in a way you wouldn't be able to do with a physical machine.

Another problem is virtual server sprawl. How does that compare to physical server sprawl?

A virtual machine when it's inactive uses no power. A virtual machine doesn't require physical space other than the disk the virtual machine file sits on. So if you have excellent monitoring and management tools around a virtual machine you're going to be in a much better position than if you had to bring out a new physical machine every time you want to run another workload. It is interesting, oftentimes when people bring in our capacity planner tool, they'll discover machines and nobody knows what they're used for.

VMware is doing application virtualization now, with the acquisition of Thinstall. Are there any other types of virtualization you haven't done yet that you might get into?

Virtualization can be a very broad, all-encompassing term. People apply virtualization to social networks, even. But we virtualize comprehensively all the hardware resources: servers, storage, network, memory, CPU, disk, I/O. We do that within ESX.

That lets you separate the software from the hardware. Then we let you virtualize the application from the operating system so you can seamlessly install an application on any version of the operating system.

In a way we're virtualizing how you do management and automation because we're simplifying it.

How is integration of Thinstall going?

The integration of Thinstall has been very seamless. That's an outstanding group of people. They already had customers using it and we just released the VMware version this week. Together we have a very strong vision of where we can take this and we're certainly executing on that.

Is it still hard to convince people that they should use virtualization?

VMware has really moved from evangelizing virtualization to communicating how it's transforming IT and providing a total simplification of increasingly complex data center operations. People trust virtualization, they know it works. The place we still have to focus our efforts is in educating people on how to [make it operational]. But that's very different from having to evangelize to people that it's a good thing to do. That's commonly accepted now.

What do you like to do when you're not at work?

When I'm not at work I love to spend time with friends, family and I love to be outdoors.

You're a sailor, right?

Yeah, I'm a sailor. I love to sail.

Do you have a lot of time for it?

I will say that VMware has been keeping me extraordinarily busy.