VMs AND CONTAINERS: IRONMAN AND SPIDERMAN

And by that analogy, virtual machines and hyperscalers could be the Marvel and DC Universes. But what if these heroes and universes joined hands instead of being busy with their own super-powers and battles? Are they? We ask Guru Venkatachalam, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, AsiaPacific & Japan, VMware about some recent and future super-forces that are shaping this world

- Pratima H

Hardware-assisted virtualisation, hardware virtualisation and bare metal virtualisation. Are they similar or not? Tomaahtoes and Tomayyytoes?

Virtualisation as a concept of abstraction of resources is the same. People can call it various things. On our part, we are excited about DPUs and it's the place where the next-generation of data centres will evolve towards. Decades back, sharing compute and handling specific workloads were problems to contend with. Then GPUs came along. A similar trend is being seen with DPUs. CPU, as a premium resource, can be managed very well when a lot of stuff can be redirected to DPU. It requires apt hardware and chip-level support. The next generation of data centres will see a lot of demand on this front.

Can containers and virtual machines coexist?

In 2019 we announced a specific architecture and solution. People in IT were used to watching VM workloads. Developers were used to watching containers as the side they see the most. We brought in an apt solution. We also brought in Kubernetes. Since the announcement, both sides have been good, and this move has resonated very well.

What about all the complexity that comes along with such co-existences? Like cloud-native and other 'chaos' environments? Is that what you are trying to address with 'cloud smart' as an approach?