Leena Joshi (VMware)
Q&A with VMware
Leena Joshi, Senior Product Marketing Manager at VMware, spoke with F5 World about the benefits of virtualization and the company's commitment to building a robust partner ecosystem.
Q: What is the importance of virtualization technology in today's IT environments?
A: With continual and exponential increases in server power, hardware is becoming simultaneously cheaper and more capable. As a result, there are very few applications in the data center that actually use all of the server capacity that exists. The result is server sprawl, which means that companies are spending a lot of money, using a lot of space, and increasing power consumption--without getting as much out of their hardware as if they had virtualized.
"[VMware] products provide application mobility benefits that make the life of an IT administrator much easier."
Leena Joshi, Senior Product
Marketing Manager, VMware
But in addition to higher consolidation and efficiency, virtualization also brings many benefits to a company's virtualized applications. For instance, with VMotion, VMware's live migration feature, applications can be moved from server to server very quickly, eliminating downtime during hardware maintenance. Our products provide application mobility benefits that make the life of an IT administrator much easier. Virtualization also makes disaster recovery simpler, and makes ensuring availability and business continuity easier. All of this contributes to a very efficient data center that can be changed quickly and dynamically.
Q: What is the role of VMware in the world of virtualization?
A: VMware was the first to market with a comprehensive virtualization solution for x86 hardware. We provide end-to-end solutions for virtualization management in the data center. In addition to allowing customers to quickly realize cost benefits through virtualization, our products allow IT administrators to perform server and storage maintenance without downtime, and to provide higher levels of availability without having to implement complex clustering solutions.
Q: What is the goal of VMware's Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program?
A: The goal of the TAP program is to enable our partners to build comprehensive solutions that complement the value VMware delivers. We want our partners to continue to provide their traditional, unique expertise in solving data center problems, and also to provide new capabilities to virtual environments. The success of VMware is highly dependent upon our partners' ability to enrich virtualization deployments. Through the TAP program, partners have easy access to VMware intellectual property for co-developing rich customer solutions.
The TAP program also helps our ISV partners deliver production-ready application solutions to customers. In the past, when ISVs wanted to deploy applications, they had to worry about what type of hardware and OS the applications would run on. The development environment was complex, requiring testing against wide ranges of hardware and software. VMware essentially enables the ISV to encapsulate the application and the OS into a single entity for deployment on a virtualization platform, without going through extensive certification testing with the customer.
Q: What role does the network play in a successful VMware virtualization strategy?
A: The network is very critical in a VMware environment. In addition to higher consolidation, utilization, and more effective use of server bandwidth, VMware makes applications mobile so that they can be moved from one server to another without disruption or downtime. And all of this application mobility takes place on the network--so the network is very critical in this environment.
Q: How do network load balancing solutions enhance the value of virtualization to customers?
A: Recently, I talked to a customer who said they had benefited tremendously from VMware virtualization because it made their applications perform better than on dedicated physical hardware. Instead of running multiple instances of an application on a single piece of hardware, they were running multiple instances of the application on virtual machines on a single piece of hardware. The performance benefit came from the fact that VMware schedules the virtual machines to run much more effectively than the OS could have done. In addition to seeking higher performance, customers are also deploying multiple instances of applications on virtual machines for redundancy purposes. Regardless of the reason for running multiple applications in parallel, a significant consequence is that overall output goes up. This makes load balancers very important because of the critical role they play in distributing network traffic among multiple virtual instances.
Q: How do storage virtualization solutions impact virtualization deployments?
A: Storage virtualization complements virtual machine deployments because it allows for better load balancing between storage areas and also for better distribution and better migration of virtual machine data from one area to another. Overall, higher levels of availability and higher levels of load balancing are brought about by storage virtualization solutions.
Additional Resources
- F5/VMware Alliance: www.f5.com/solutions/technology-alliances/virtualization/vmware.html
By Anne Landfield, a freelance writer based in Seattle.
October 2008
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