Raghu Raghuram figures to have more than a little influence on the direction and shaping of VMware Inc.'s products and services over the next few years. Currently vice president of products and solutions, Raghuram has served in a number of capacities in product management and marketing during his tenure at VMware. He most recently handled the product marketing for VMware's Infrastructure product line.

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Raghuram sat down with Redmond Editor Ed Scannell to discuss the differing technical perspectives Microsoft and VMware have on hypervisors, the company's new product announcements at its first European-based VMworld show, and VMware's efforts to balance its Windows and open source-based strategies.

Redmond: What are the major differences between VMware and Microsoft in how each company views hypervisors?

Raghuram: There are some stark differences. Our view is that the core virtualization layer belongs in the hardware. It also has to be much smaller in order to reduce its surface area for attacks. This is why we introduced the 3i architecture, which will become mainstream over the course of this year.

Our product will be less than 32MB, but will still have all the functionality. Our sense is if you turn on the server, you turn on virtualization at the same time. Our approach is similar to that of mainframes and big Unix machines where there's no separate virtualization software as part of the operating system. Our architecture enables this notion of a plug-and-play data center. So, if they need more capacity for the data center, then they just roll in a new server, which is automatically virtualized.

The Microsoft approach is to have virtualization be an adjunct to the OS. With the Virtual Server architecture, it's explicitly a separate layer that relies on the OS. With the Hyper-V architecture, they're still maintaining the same dependency on the OS, so it's not fundamentally different than the Virtual Server in that respect. The downside for customers is the Virtual Server architecture is still tied to a commercial OS, which is fairly vulnerable to attacks and has a big footprint.

Read the rest of this RedmondMag interview, here.