Virtualization_Interviews

=INTERVIEWS=

Interview Forrest Blair, CEO of Virtuon, on behalf of Dr. Joseph Hui
//1. What common problems or mistakes occur during planning and moving to virtualized environments, either on server or desktop?// I think from Virtuon's experience, the legacy issues of existing applications may need more attention before the migration, often not because that virtualization is not good but people may blame the new environment when the server/desktop have issues of their own. So when the new environment "may not work" like before, they tend to blame virtualization. Of course there are other issues, such as applications not running in the cloud when they do not even run on the Windows platform. But from our experience, things are a lot more smooth and people are happy when they have more ready access to applications and more reliable backup.

//2. Where do you see the technology progressing in the future?// Cloud is not just a technology, but a mode of business. Effectively it is running applications and storage on the Internet, without worrying about hardware, software, and networking. The technology shall continue to virtualize more things: memory, storage (what iCloud is now), applications (e.g. patient record), IO (your own virtual Ethernet port anywhere), desktop (an iPad as the window to the world), and your VPN, etc. Money and finance is probably the next thing (your wallet in the cloud). Identification, and in China, surveillance is a big deal (with most of the cameras and spying software actually provided by the US

//3. How does virtualization compare to centralization, in particular with desktops?// Desktops as Steve Jobs put it, is dead. By that he means desktops can be replaced by iPads as an information access device while the cloud is where all data and applications are stored and run. In that regard, virtualization is really running programs and data, usually as separate files, to instantiate objects, much like Agent Smith is replicated ad nausea. I do not see that as an issue of virtualization versus centralization. Virtualization involves digitizing of things, machines or signals. Centralization is more an administrative issue. You can virtualize and centralize at the same time, e.g. surveillance in China.

//4. What scale do you see being applied to these products?// //Examples: 1) Applications running in a virtual machine or wholly independent of the operating system;// There shall always be operating system if by that you mean allocating resources to applications, e.g. in VM world that is vSphere, and in other worlds: KVM or Azure running on their hyper-visors. I suppose you mean OS such as Windows or Linux and I suppose VM sits on top of them via a hypervisor. The scale: unlimited, much like Agent Smiths.

//and, 2) Desktops running on hosted or local virtual machines?// VDI shall become prevalent, but ultimately people do not see VD, but rather virtualized application (meaning they do not need the desktop nor the application software, but rather running applications in the cloud). Our experience is that cloud computing is whatever it takes to make people's life easier in terms of access, storage, and use of data, and that means doing all that in the cloud.

Interview with Jim Cook
Director, Global Business Development Arizona State University SkySong Notes from interview: Mid-70s Stem from IBM, vm370; emulation of IBM Op Sys. Citrix built some of front MS OEM licensed Citrix First terminals licensed OEM from Remember Moore's Law improvement from single processor to multi-processors boosted performance sustainability became a problem MS Hyper-V, actual product ~2006, MS licensed by Citrix, **research look at Citrix** their code became part of Hyper-V; related to NetApp, doing storage for virtual environments platforms set for public and private clouds; don't care about desktop; they just run in virtual environment Microsoft, EMC, VMWare,

Parallels, didn't like primarily from ownership personality Mac, dislikes All started with virtual emulation 6:00 VMWare, bought many companies to produce their virtual desktop start up MS has improved remote management

challenge with virtual environments, if you're not at the physical office for interupt messages Tucows Intercept message on remote device without returning to office Idea started with emulations with vm370, slowly moved forward because price of computing came down, real estate, electric, sustainability, environment, potential expense... ipad, mac air,

Xen products, maybe from Palo Alto, Frank Arteli from Microsoft Citrix out of Florida

Lot of the connections I had made at Citrix were people I knew who were MS advisors. Maybe money.... Watching what was going on in Silicon Valley and were making moves to get advisors into Citrix... board level advisors. Frank Arteli from Microsoft. Bridging between silicon valley virtual environment and what was going on at microsoft around guys like that. We have to do this; go through a third party to make it happen.

11:20: What do you see going on in the individual Apps? Is microsoft doing anything like that, firewalling individual apps. I think that's the way they are going. It wouldn't surprise me to see them run the app in a totally secure environment. I think the really interesting thing will be dealing with all these Droid applications and iPhone applications. There is a serve backend somewhere; it will be interesting to see kind of what the movement of running it on your phone or somewhere else and screen flash back to your phone. If you lose connectivity, would you lose access to the service or potentially lose data? If you lose anything, some applications, social gaming for example, store on server in Verison. [discuss losing game data and restoring] Some pieces will run local, other parts will run remote. That would explain some of the latency issues. I think ms... I think VM3, Xen, can run in protected mode for running remote. Pretty sure most of them do that. I would be surprised if they didn't. Otherwise crap out one of those apps at the server, could bring down. Trojan gets in, individual gets in, figures out how to compromise that app, log in to app somewhere. Hackers bring it down just to bring it down. I think that is much more secure now than it was. Microsoft might not get it. The thing with Microsoft, never count them out, They may not be the first to market, but by the time they hit their third round, it's solid. It's backed by a big company, so some of these littler guys might have some cool stuff, but when it's break, like Parallels, what's your customer service experience. If I'm not a hacker or techie, then what?

Check out Xen.

Have you seen the hosted public/private virtual machines? Not seen; Services that will run simple windows PC....

Hosted vs Local VMs

Better for end-users just to be handled out in the cloud. Private or public cloud? Either way. Everybody does that know. You see... WYSE in San Jose [connected to Unisys] Had cool line of product back in 86; PC oriented computers. Kind of fell off the market. About 2 years ago, came out with cloud devices. They cloud washed the terminal and made it like a terminal. You don't get the boot time. Sun had the SLC (Simple Little Computer) and ELC (Elegant Little Computer). Basically it was keyboard, mouse, and dataless thin client. From 1990/91, whole idea was just boot Sun OS. Hadn't get into thin-client; needed horse power of Sun box, over 10Mbps, needed fast boot time. You had dataless clients. SLC, done out of boston. Didn't off shore it, but terminal and smart devices done of Boston.

Corporate Environment; What do you think the greatest challenges to get virtualization implement in a company. Trained people, and people who understand how to fix it. Once there, the only thing you may notice is slowness. There are some who carry their own data. For me, everything is mirrored in the cloud somewhere. I think having technical people understand how that all works, and able to maintain it. so you don't lose when things go stupid. I think other things are type of connectivity, to give you performance you need, depending on the users, quality of service to where the user is. You need to think through not just the virtualization but the whole eco-system for the applications you're going to run in a virtual environment. The other thing I think you need to be careful in vendor selection. Unless you're the kind of company that want's open source. Good news and bad news with open source in virtual environments; Good news, it's inexpensive; and bad news, it's unsupported. Keep it simple, off-the-shelf; Microsoft, Sun/Oracle, Citrix, others;

Management tools VMWare think of themselves as grandfather;

Analogy to BTOS Convergent

Virtualization in start-ups Anything that helps companies get to market quickly; don't have to fiddle around with; too many startups have one CTO, you don't want him screwing around with, unless your doing applications for virtualization. You don't want to slow your people down maintaining that kind of work. Unless you're in that kind of business, building apps, you want to run your app, you want to test your app, least expensive way to do that right now in virtual environment in a cloud. If you are going to do it local, you're going to have people who get it.

Connection will be continually needed.

Look at your core competencies, and find most cost effective method that doesn't cause you heartburn. What we started recommending to our startups who come through VentureCatalyst, recently signed up with incubator, with bizSparks. It is for cloud applications for applications. First 2 years, basically free. Run the app and development in the cloud. By end of year two, ready to go live or you're dead. Beginning of year three, drop point, start charging full price for Azure. BizSpark is program, Azure is platform. Under Bizspark program, 2 app suites; Azure and Windows Mobile. Idea being where ever you are; Microsoft will meet with you, and set up accounts. Takes about 1 week. You need qualification to get license.

Education; what type of education will bring someone into this environment ASU Online should be virtual. Possible saturation of pipe. Lot of expense is people to support hardware.