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Rich Wolski on Eucalyptus: Open Source Cloud Computing (Video Interview – 2/2)

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In this second part of our video interview with Rich Wolski (see the first part here), recorded at the O’Reilly Velocity conference, we learn how Eucalyptus came around the Amazon subscription method, where credit cards are the key to authentication. Offering ‘free and open’ clouds in university environments was achieved by introducing a system administrator in between the user account request and the issuing of certificates. Upon user request, the Eucalyptus user subscription interface generates an e-mail to an administrator, who will then perform a ‘manual’ verification. This can be a phone call or a physical meeting.


Eucalyptus Director Rich Wolski on open source cloud computing, Xen and Amazon’s EC2 (part 2/2) from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.

Users did not like Rocks (leading open source cloud management tool), but the community (in smaller community/ deployment supports) preferred to do this manually. So Eucalyptus 1.1 provides Guidance, a script to build from scratch by hand.

A ‘build with one button’ remains the goal for future versions.

The full Eucalyptus image is only 55 Mb (without Linux image) and includes the necessary packages in order to make sure all of the revision-levels are fully compatible. Eucalyptus comes as Free BSD Open-Source license with a small disclaimer that the University of Santa Barbara explicitly wants to avoid any intellectual property infringements and will take necessary steps if needed.

Virtualization is supported by Xen 3.1 for security sake (3.0 works too, but is discouraged).

Lessons learned in building clouds from open source are quite rare. Here are a few from Rich:

Unlike commercial environments (where one controls the configuration, hardware purchase and networking), the architectural decisions are very different in open source environment, where one does not know the installation. One of the current challenges is to build a system depending on the control you have over your specific installation, you could successfully remove more of the portability from the system as you needs fit.

A second lesson is that people do things by hand and this is an opportunity for automation. Nobody is deploying Linux manually, instead sys admin use distributions. Shouldn’t there be a similar cloud distribution product out there? The people at Puppet were eager to help on providing such scripts for cloud deployments. According to Rich, this illustrates how O’Reilly should be credited for creating a good atmosphere at the Velocity 08 conference where a lot of cross-fertilization happened.

Rich ends the interview by throwing a fundamental question at the cloud community. He classifies current cloud initiatives on a scale based on the ‘closeness’ of the application layer to the cloud API. At the one end of this spectrum, he puts Google Apps (with Python oriented function calls) and at the other end Amazon EC2 (a set of very simple web service interfaces to the underlying virtualization technology) and all other cloud offerings float in between. This impacts what you can do with virtualization. Google AppEngine becomes your compiler on their end of the scale.

Rich wonders if this tighter link to the Google AppEngine will become a liability or an asset in the future when it comes to virtualization capabilities?

We invite you to provide your answers in the comments below!

Exclusive Video: VMware In A Nutshell, By Product Marketing Manager John Gilmartin

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So what’s VMware all about now on a technology level, now that their stock went tumbling and their CEO has been replaced? John Gilmartin, Group Manager, Product Marketing at VMware answered our questions on virtualization in general and their strategy and product portfolio in particular.

After defining virtualization and virtual machines, John dives deeper into what drives prospective virtualization customers (infrastructure consolidation, high availability, business continuity, disaster recovery?). He also shares more on their recently announced VMsafe initiative, which allows trusted partners to ‘peak’ into a Virtual Machine and identify threats from the outside of the operating systems and the applications they try to protect.

John underlines that VMware is offering features far beyond the basic data center consolidation needs; such as life cycle management, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), automated provisioning, fail over, disaster recovery and optimize the management tasks for a virtual infrastructure.

All this is part of VMware’s from-desktop-to-datacenter portfolio and makes VMware feel confident and well positioned to compete with Hyper-V from Microsoft.

Rich Wolski on Eucalyptus: Open Source Cloud Computing (Video Interview – 1/2)

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A month ago we reported on how you can build your own open source cloud on clusters to make your personal cloud dreams come true!  Simply put your datacenter to use by ordering Xen virtualization on the Rocks and then carefully roll it in fresh Eucalyptus leaves.

In order to learn what makes these clouds tick, we have sent our enthusiastic cloud computing koala Toon Vanagt to San Francisco to interview Eucalyptus Director Rich Wolski at the O’Reilly Velocity conference. Below, you can find the first part of this exclusive video interview (we’ll post the second part tomorrow).

Rich’s students came up with EUCALYPTUS, which stands for ‘Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems’ as an open-source tool for doing “cloud computing”. Their tool is designed to stimulate the development, interest, experiments and research into the nascent concept and industry of cloud computing.

Eucalyptus was build in a modular fashion, so it can “mimic” the interface of popular commercial clouds, like the one they started off with, Amazon EC2. The team plans support for several cloud interfaces as long as they are public and well documented.

Rich underlined that Eucalyptus is designed to experiment and not to compete with industrial strength clouds as Amazon EC2. Although with some engineering, one could take parts of Eucalyptus, mature those and scale to specific needs.

When asked about the underlying virtualization experience, Xen is seen as a very useful technology in ‘cloud’ regards. Rich complements Xen on being well documented and conceptually easy to understand and he looks back at the Xen selection as a good first hypervisor choice. Due to the nature of their specific use, parts of Xen would ‘break’ under load and were modified to meet certain stability needs.

As LibVert is used, Eucalyptus should in theory be relatively easy be able to support other hypervisors such as VMware and KVM. If no major wrinkles appear on the development surface, Eucalyptus therefore expects to support VMware and KVM with its 2.0 release, scheduled for early September 2008.

Rich supportively points to the Enomalism elastic computing platform, an open source cloud platform that enables a scalable enterprise IT and local cloud infrastructure. as an alternative open source virtualization system.

Security remains an issue but in some respects, accountability and authentication are an even bigger problem to the open source community than within commercial projects. “In an academic space, where you are not paying for usage, it is not a credit card that you are accounting to, but a user”. So Eucalyptus had to devise a user accounting system that is based on certificates. On top of that components should not be ‘spoofable’, as there is no message encryption in Eucalyptus (yet). Because these messages can be spoofed, Rich’s team had to take care of an open source implementation of Web Services Security to make sure the cloud controllers cannot be ‘fooled’ by malicious messages of doubtful origin.

The shortage of public IP addresses in university environments was solved by using the open source technology VDE (Virtual Distributed Ethernet). [VDE is an ethernet compliant virtual network that can be spawned over a set of physical computer over the Internet. You can see VDE as the software incarnation of a hardware network switch plus attached cables. Using the vde_switch and vde_plug programs you are able to create quite complex virtual analogies of a network that can span several hosts, even across the Internet.

By creating a virtual Ethernet for every cluster allocation and make that a set of user space processes can tunnel through NATs (Network Address Translation). As a downside to this VDE implementation comes a performance penalty. So Eucaluptus is offered with 2 flavors, linked to the SLA-nature in cloud computing. The first option uses the described very flexible ‘Virtual VLAN’ independent of IP-addresses. The second option bypasses VDE and is faster but less scalable as limits user requests to the confines of a single cluster.

Tomorrow, we’ll publish the second part of this exclusive interview. Stay tuned!

VMware and Parallels Are Not Hyperventilating on Hyper-V Launch by Microsoft (video interviews)

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Last week we happened to be at VMware’s headquarters when Microsoft launched Hyper-V, Redmond’s much anticipated built-in hypervisor for Windows Server 2008. So we got our camera rolling to capture VMware’s reaction on Microsoft’s free hypervisor offering. Straight after that exclusive interview, we flew from Silicon Valley to New York to collect more video feedback from Parallels. Both vendors calmly welcomed Microsoft to the bare-metal hypervisor market and underlined Hyper-V is only a first version product release from Microsoft, missing critical features, which virtualization spoiled clients can no longer miss in their datacenters.

The video is also up on YouTube, Steamocracy and Blip.tv.

As an introduction to novice readers, we shortly explain the difference between Hyper-V (a bare-metal hypervisor), and the older Virtualization products Microsoft has been marketing, such as Virtual PC and Virtual Server (sometimes confusingly referred to as hosted hypervisors). Hyper-V is a bare-metal hypervisor (commonly referred to as Type 1 or Native Virtualization), which is software that runs directly on the hardware, as an operating system control program. A guest operating system such as Windows, Solaris or Linux thus runs at the second level above the hardware. This means Hyper-V is only a thin abstraction layer which boots on the native hardware and thus provides hardware abstraction services to the operatingsystem environment (performing some of the functions of an OS kernel). This differs from hosted hypervisors (commonly referred to as Type 2 or Host-Based Virtualization), which is software that runs within an operating system environment (Host). A guest operating system (Virtual Machine) thus runs at the third level above the host and the underlying hardware. Bare-metal hypervisors are supposedly faster and more enterprise scalable. The disadvantages are most of these hypervisors are hardware dependent and usually require hardware support to get the most out of the virtualized feature set (i.e. Intel VT or AMD-V processors).

At VMware we got a first reaction on Hyper-V from John Gilmartin, Group Manager, Product Marketing: “Hyper-V is a first generation product. It is a hypervisor that runs virtual machines and that is what Vmware has been doing since back in 2000-2001. What it doesn’t offer is a whole set of virtual infrastructure capabilities, that would run on top of a hypervisor. Things like: Live migration with VMotion or resource scheduling for load balancing Virtual Machines. These are really fundamental capabilities that our customers tell us are required for doing production consolidation or for providing high-availability for virtual machines or for running a disaster recovery solution on top of Virtualization. So from our perspective Hyper-V is a first generation product. Our customers are asking for a whole rich virtualization set of virtual infrastructure software that goes well beyond just a hypervisor.”

Kurt Daniel, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Online at Parallels went on to add “…we actually are a big partner of Microsoft and them of us in the hosting and Software-as-a-Service-markets for Virtualization and Automation. In the general market we see Hyper-V as being late to the market and having a platform deficit… It is also a little bit of ‘now you see it and now you don’t get it’-Virtualization in terms of missing live migration that was initially promised. That is a ticket-to-entry-feature that Parallels offers …Finally we think IT pro’s and developers are not fooled by the low price [free with the Windows Server 2008 OS ]…and we think it does fall short in this early release”

Tony Asaro, Chief Strategy Officer at Virtual Iron summarizes it this way “Even more importantly, Hyper-V doesn’t have the mobility, high availability, recoverability and load balancing capabilities that actually make server virtualization valuable to customers. Yes, it will provide server consolidation, but that is the easier part of server virtualization and for most customers, not where the real value is.”

Sun’s Senior Director of xVM, Vijay Sarathy markets his concerns as follows “We’re glad to see Microsoft finally entering the hypervisor market. Customers are hungry for virtualization solutions that support a wide range of operating systems and virtualization platforms. Simply put, Sun is committed to building a heterogeneous (Windows, Linux and Solaris) and interoperable (ESX and Hyper-V) virtualization platform. To that end, Sun has joined Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program, supporting Windows as a guest operating system on Sun’s xVM Server hypervisor…With Sun xVM VirtualBox, xVM VDI, xVM Server and xVM Ops Center Sun provides a holistic approach to Windows-focused customers looking for virtualization and management solutions. We’ve already seen great traction with Sun xVM VirtualBox, the industry’s first free and open source hypervisor to offer support for all major operating systems, including Windows, which has already been downloaded more than 5 million times.”

Microsoft’s missing Virtrualization feature list

Reading through the reactions from the competitiors make the missing feature list look something like this:

  1. No Live Virtual Machine relocation/migration capabilities: The ability to seamlessly live-move guest virtual machines from one physical server to another is offered by most Virtualization vendors, with products such as VMware VMotion , Parallels Virtuozzo, Citrix XenMotion, … These zero downtime migration capabilities are the most pointed at by the competition, but this cutting-edge feature seems less high on the priority list of SMB virtualization prospects with consolidation on their minds.
  2. Platform deficit (limited to Windows and Suse Linux Enterprise). In the glory days of the Bill Gates-era ‘Microsoft Windows’ was almost a synonym for ‘X86 desktop and server operating system’. So supporting a non-windows OS like Suse Linux is a fairly new ball game in Redmond and we are curious how this trend will develop into wider support of guest operating systems and distributions in Linux, BSD and Solaris…
  3. No hypervisor virtual machine transformation tools from competitor’s VM-formats into Microsoft’s VHD-format. Those who manage heterogeneous environments are impatiently waiting for the virtualization industry to embrace the DMTF Open Virtual Format (OVF) to ensure portability, integrity and automated installation/configuration of virtual machines. This should allow Microsoft System Center VMM to manage XenServer by using DMTF CIM based interfaces. All this openness with a hypervisor-independent portable virtual machine format promises transformation of a complete application workload with resource requirements, configuration and customization parameters, license and signatures to facilitate appliance integrity and security checking…
  4. Unproven and uncertain security levels are an easy and all-time favorite for competitors to throw at Microsoft. However their use of a full version of Microsoft Windows for the parent partition (fully trusted by Hyper-V) seems ‘courageous ’ as it extends the hypervisor attack surface.
  5. Limited virtual structure management capabilities. Although this and the next points cannot be expected from a pure hypervisor, many competitors point at an incomplete offering. It should be noted that the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM) is currently downloadable in open beta testing and integration can be expected with Operation Manager (SCOM), Configuration Manager (SCCM) and Data Protection Manager (DPM).
  6. No resource scheduling for load balancing Virtual Machines (VM)
  7. No virtual desktop management

Although Jason Perlow over at ZDnet is quite enthusiastic about Hyper-V, he does point to an additional Hyper-V Manager shortcoming when it comes to the administration and guest installation. “Unfortunately, Hyper-V Manager can only run natively in Windows Server 2008 (32-bit or 64-bit) or on Vista SP1, so you will either need to administrate it from a few token Vista machines using the RSAT tools, via RDP connection, or directly from the Windows Server 2008 server console itself. RDP from a Terminal Server client itself is fine, as screen performance and response time is very good and runs even on Open Source Oses. However, RDP is infuriating to work from while a guest OS is being installed for the first time. For some odd reason, Hyper-V actually prevents you from using a mouse in a guest console window until the Integration Tools are actually installed, so you’ll have to be skilled in using the key when installing a guest from remote if you keep XP or Linux at your desk. Hopefully, your datacenter uses IP KVM infrastructure if you don’t want to stand up a Vista system or another copy of Server 2008 on your desk to administrate your remote boxes for those times you do a guest install from scratch.” Jason goes on to applaud Microsoft for “…releasing the Hypercall Adapter into GPL, so both community and commercial Linux distributions will be able to take advantage of Hyper-V” .

We are confident that Mike Neil and his team at Microsoft are working hard to get those ‘missing’ features in future Virtualization product releases and it is believed Microsoft and Citrix/XenServer are collaborating on merging the code additions from the Hypercall Adapter into the upstream Linux Xen Kernel, so that in the future, a separate Hypercall Adapter will not be necessary for Linux.

Independent analyst and blogger Brian Madden boldly predicts that Citrix XenServer might drop Xen as the underlying virtualization engine and switch to Hyper-V in order to put the ‘relationship’ between Microsoft and Citrix back in balance. He reminds us that the Hyper-V and Xen architecture are much alike. We hesitate if IT-relationships make you lose your ‘soul’ so easily, but will treat Brian to a round of free drinks if his unlikely prediction becomes true in the near future. We do know the Xen-community would be relieved to be able to add the Xen brand name to its products again.

It is interesting to read no competitors are hinting directly at potential stability issues, they do all repeat the CIO-mantra of not adopting a Redmond first version for mission critical systems. Even though Microsoft itself relies on Hyper-V for its own datacenters to handle a part of its live traffic.

There seems no more money to be made in ‘basic’ hypervisors (mobile devices might be the short term exception to this rule). So vendors have to excel in a niche or extend to a complete virtualization portfolio where their product offering supports a large number operating systems, with minimal hypervisor overhead to boost guest performance, open API’s and holistic management tools around the hypervisor to easily manage both the virtual and physical infrastructure components as servers, desktops, network, storage while taking care of securityy, high-availibility and disaster recovery. They might even have to throw in a connection broker (VDI). Those broad virtualization vendors that manage to ‘host’ a profitable third-part eco-system around their own products seem to have the best long term perspective for large market adoption.

Our guess is that Microsoft preferred to release an ‘incomplete’ hypervisor 1.0 ahead of schedule to aim for the SMB-market in the short term and get partners on their train. Microsoft sacrified the announced ‘Live migration’-capabilities from the Hyper-V feature set to shorten the time to market. But in a few quarters we expect Microsoft to approach their corporate clients with a Hyper-V 2.0 release that could put them on par with the competition’s richer feature sets. By that time Microsoft might also be able to boast about its fully integrated offering within their management tool family and a wider support of non-Microsoft operating systems and a list add-on products by external partners.

Time will tell. In the mean time we will continue to cover on the hypervisor battles from the trenches of our beloved Virtualization industry.

Talk back in comments below and let us know what experience Hyper-V gives you or which top 5 industry players you expect to rule in a year and for which niche markets; such as the hypervisor market, the host-based virtualization industry, virtual desktop infrastructure or even for the holistic virtual and physical infrastructure management suites.

Microsoft Eats Own Hyper-V Dog Food, Deploys Homegrown Hypervisor In Its Global Datacenters (Video Interview)

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At last week’s GigaOM VIP reception, just before their Structure 08 conference, we bumped into Arne Josefsberg, General Manager Online Infrastructure at Microsoft. He happened to be passing by in San Francisco and kindly agreed to get on record with comments on Hyper-V adoption at Microsoft. As he answered our late night questions, the party was just breaking up (hence the disturbing background sounds).

Update: also check out this article on GigaOM, since Om Malik caught up with Microsoft’s corporate VP of global foundation services, Debra Chrapaty, for a video chat as well.

Although Arne declined to put exact numbers to the amount of servers at Microsoft, he did confirm he is responsible for dozens of datacenters around the world to support the software giant’s online services. To give you an idea, Data Center Knowledge noted from a Microsoft executive that the company is adding no less than 10 000 servers per month.

Here is a datacenter lesson from Arne:

“As Microsoft obviously deploys a huge amount of processor, compute and storage capacity, [the need for] efficiency and utilization become super important to us. We work very closely with the Windows Operating system division. Hyper-V is actually becoming one of our key-technologies to drive better utilization of the hardware. We have Hyper-V in multiple datacenters in the Live-network, in production environments taking live traffic. It’s going quite quite well. So we are very jazzed about Hyper-V and virtualization as a technology to scale out our infrastructure.”

Arne’s team has been working closely with the Hyper-V development team for over a year and did not limit this collaboration to the hypervisor, but also the management tools and on how to manage hypervisors at very large scale.

When asked about cloud computing, Microsoft refers to its ‘Software plus Services’ strategy which combines software on the desktop (still the major revenue driver for Microsoft) with centralized datacenter-based services. Microsoft seems high on its hybrid flavor of cloud computing and hopes to lead the way in this nascent industry as well.

“Benchmarking” The Citrix / XenServer Combo with Ian Pratt (Video Interview – Part 3)

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During the Fosdem 2008 conference, we had a chance to sit down (on a bench) with Xen Guru Ian Pratt. Below is the third part (see part 1 and part 2) of our exclusive interview, where Ian shines his XenServer light on the Xen page tables algorithms, open source community involvement, management frameworks, the Citrix take-over, virtualization marketing with OS-enlightment, FUD-tactics by VMWare, …

We cut the interview into 4 digestable pieces, which we publish one at a time (see part 1 and part 2). As said, this is the third part (you can also find a written transcript below for your convenience):

This video is also available on Vimeo and Streamocracy.

(0:02) As you are one of the core members of the Xen project, you know that one of the hardest issues to address are the shadow page tables, which are a head ache when you build a hypervisor. I believe you are in the 6th rewrite of the Xen page tables algorithms. At the same time we see that the hardware vendors try to address this in a different way, by supporting it from the hardware up. What is the best way to go?

“It is one of those areas where having some hardware support certainly helps, but it is not a panacea, certainly with the hardware implementations that exist today. There are plenty of benchmarks (probably most benchmarks) that prove that the software approach of Xen wins out. Because there has been a lot of investment into that software approach and there is some really clever code in there right now, written by some super smart people. It is an interesting arms race between the two. One of the things that we are looking at is depending on the workload -dynamically chosen- whether you use the hardware approach or the purely software approach. You kind of hope that for that particular one –at least for the basic functionality- the hardware wins out over time. But there will always be parts of virtualizing the MMU (Memory Management Unit) which are best done by software. That is where OS-enlightment (aka) Para-virtualization comes in. That is a huge win for virtualizing the MMU.”

(1:30) That is a term I hear more often now. Where does the marketing term: “OS-enlightment” come from?

“We had been using the term para-virtualization. I think it was Microsoft that came up with the term “enlightment”, which we have been told is very much a nod to the Xen-heritage. Microsoft probably has rather more budget to spend on marketing than open source projects.”

We all know Microsoft understands a few things about marketing.

“I am not at all upset with that term. I am quite happy to use it and adopt it.”

(2:09) So Ian, it is quite interesting you just mentioned Citrix and the sun joined us. Do you think the contributions from the open source community have slowed down since the Citrix takeover?

“We certainly have not seen that! If you think about the life of the Xen project, there have been a number of significant changes.
When we left the university to setup XenSource, people were worried we might go off and take Xen in closed source or something, which we did not do. It is still the same group of guys, basically myself, Keir Fraser, Steve Hand, Christian Limpach…all off the same guys working on the project, with now many more off course.

Then Citrix acquired XenSource and we obviously had to explain to people what was happening. I think our community has seen that nothing has changed. One of the things that we did do was just to provide greater transparency. We have setup Xen.org, the Xen advisory board and all of the web site and everything where we run Xen.org. The advisory board now has focus from companies like Intel , AMD, HP, IBM. All big companies that are now contributing to Xen and have that oversight from the advisory board. So I think the community is pretty happy and it’s going from strength to strength.”

(3:33) How do you see the shift XenSource (now XenServer) made from building a para-virtualized platform, that served the open-source community and mainly targeted unix/linux-environments, to a company which has another main audience with Bill, the average Windows admin.

“We were never focused just on running only open source operating systems. That was never the aim. We wanted to build a platform that would be OS-agnostic and to be able to run any OS and do a great job at it. We have always put an awful lot of effort into supporting Windows, because there are a lot of windows OS instances out there, we can’t deny that. It is something that always has been important to us. What is different is the way that XenSource and now Citrix look at packaging Xen. Lots of different companies are bringing Xen to market. Obviously the Linux vendors are mainly concerned about running Linux. Solaris and Sun are mainly concerned about running Solaris. One of the things Citrix / Xenserver are trying to do is making sure it is OS agnostic and we did a great job at running Windows and a great job at running Linux as well.
Xen is awesome running Linux and completely blows any other virtualization solution out of the water and at running Windows it is extremely good too. Let’s put it this way: I am unaware of any benchmarks we lose. “

(05:02) When you look at the fight going on between the companies building the management frameworks for Xen and projects like Enomaly, OpenQrm, Redhat & Novell. Was the acquisition of Xensource by Citrix your easy way out of that fight?

“I think we are still very much in the fight. Xensource and all of these other companies are building management frameworks on top of Xen. I think that all of these companies are coming at it from a different point of view. Linux vendors are trying to provide that same look & feel they have within Linux and expose Virtualization through those same GUIs and tools. The difference is that companies like XenSource and Citrix are interested in making it very easy to use and are building a Virtual Machine hosting appliance, hiding all that complexity and expose it via a web GUI or a Windows user interface.

There are always going to be lots of companies building tools on top of Xen. Even if you look at XenServer, there are all of these other companies building products on top of XenServer, like Egenera, Platform, Marathon. There is a very healthy eco-system of building stuff on top of other people’s stuf. I guess people are happy, because everybody is making money.”

06:27 Some analysts say Microsoft acquired Xensource by proxy, hinting at a future take-over of Citrix by Microsoft. What is your opinion on that topic?

“I truly do not know anything about that. I think if Microsoft was going to buy Citrix, it would have done so a long time ago. I think that Microsoft is a very close Citrix partner and that XenSource has worked with Microsoft as well. There are a number of projects on which we have worked together, such as defining some of the para-virtualization or OS-enlightment extensions to enable Xen-guests to run on Microsoft’s hypervisor when that ships and also vice-versa. We have always found Microsoft quite easy to deal with to be honest.”

(07:16) You get good support from Microsoft?

“Certainly all the people that we deal with are perfectly nice guys.”

(7:23) So let’s talk about the less perfectly nice guys & women. When I read articles on blogs and in the press, I feel that VMware is recently throwing some mud at Citrix and Xensource and especially the marketing department. They try to cast some doubt on your products and projects. What do you think about these marketing techniques?

“Well there has been a certain use of FUD-tactics and things like that. That is sort of a natural reaction. That is what marketing departments will go and do. We have good working relationships with some of the technical folks at VMware and we work together on the OVF virtual appliance format. I know that some of their engineers get pretty embarrassed about some of the stuff their marketing department does. VMware tries to position things which are Xen features or architectural implementations as ‘weaknesses’ against their product. Whereas they know they have teams working flat out to get and implement those same ‘weaknesses’ into their own product. That is just the way it is. Marketing departments go off and do that, but at the end of the day customers will hopefully get the right message and buy the right product.”

(08:45) At least it shows they take you seriously.

“I guess we should be flattered.”

View part 1 or part 2 of this interview.