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...after the recent debacle where SWSoft added heavy advertising for their own products into the Plesk web hosting panel (and basically gave the finger to customers complaining) this latest escapade doesn't really surprise me I'm afraid.

Full details here: http://forum.swsoft.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid =38249

> As an aside, I forgot to mention that there are NO other products other than VMWare ESX that offer "live migration" of a running VM from one hardware host to another. That's right... you can take a VM that is running with many users actively using it and move it from one physical box to another with only a few milliseconds down time. The users NEVER notice. The free VMWare server can't do that. Micrsoft's Virtual Server can't do that until they have a hypervisor. And there really isn't anything else that can.

    Hmm, the Virtuozzo servers I administer actually do that rather well. Virtuozzo has had live migration capability (and dynamic resource allocation) for quite a while now.

Let's look at what are the companies in partnership with XEN and with SWSoft (OpenVX copyright owner). HP appears only on one list.

http://www.xensource.com/partners/

http://www.swsoft.com/en/partners

xen can do a lot of what zones do, albeit much less efficiently

From the article: "When quizzed on Microsoft's plans, Mr. Ballmer replied, "Our view is that virtualization is something that should be built into the operating system.""

Virtualization belongs below the operating system, let's say in the BIOS.

that depends on what kind of virtualization you want. there are differnet kinds, based on what you want to do.

i think that he is saying that you should run your virtualization stuff at the os level, ala openVZ.

i guess it goes without saying that "virtualization" is *such* an overloaded term now a days that you can never be sure what anyone is talking about anymore.

in a nutshell, OS level virtualization (according to the these folks) means that the OS itself is virtualized instead of the hardware which is the vmware/ms virtual server way. OS level virtualization means that you run one OS, and each virtual environment is a container with a "private" instance of that OS... like a root jail on steroids.

what you end up with is a bunch of instances of the same OS. the virtual servers are shielded from eachother, and the host shielded from the virtual servers, but the virtual servers are not necessarily shielded from the host. the key difference is that all of them, virtual server and host alike, are running the same kernel. they don't run copies of the same kernel, they all talk to the same running kernel. this means simpler setup and administration and more efficient use of disk, cpu and memory thanks to reduced redundancy in hardware and operating system emulation and/or abstraction. openVZ pretty much lets you run a bunch of iterations of the same OS, but with different applications, users, IPs, etc.

you essentially are giving up the ability to run arbitrary guest OS's in exchange for simpler configuration and more efficient use of resources.

it seems to me that OS level virtualization (instead of hardware/hypervisor virtualization) is more along the lines of what MS would want, which is people buying lots of windows licenses, or just paying up for the most expensive version of windows so they can virtualize to the fullest extent of their hardware's capabilities.

i think that this might be the first step to competing with VMWare and all the others that let you run windows servers on linux. one way to improve stability in anything is to reduce the number of things that it does. the weird language in vista about using licenses in virtualization might be the precursor to the different tiers for the next iteration of windows server where buying the top level OS grants you the licensing freedom to many virtualized servers on the same machine.

what will be most interesting is if active directory and the like will change... will you still be required you to run DNS and other services on your AD server? or, will you be able to off load those services to "smaller" single function virtual servers?

Are we talking exclusively hardware virtualization? Because leaps and bounds are being made in OS virtualization as well. Solaris/Nexenta zones spring immediately to mind, as does Virtuozzo

Virtuozzo is in production since 2001, according to http://www.swsoft.com/en/company It is way ahead of Solaris Zones, which, by the way, still lacks proper resource management, similar to that found in OpenVZ/Virtuozzo. And why resource management is of paramount importance is described in Andrey's interview.

Having said that, if GSX does go the way of free beer, I'll still pick up a support contract. I tend to spend more money on Open Source software than I do on closed and free beer or no EMC and VMWare Corp will still get a few pennies out of me.

Oh, and the current count is 2U seems to hold 1.9 TiB. Next server I'll have to do better.

Xen has caused major shifts in business direction for commercial virtualisation companies: VMWare suddenly released their VMWare player in part as an effort to make their "virtual machine file format" the standard one. Look they even want to support virtualisation standards now! SWSoft kicked off OpenVZ for similar motivation: because Xen is a competing solution and (they gamble) that it is going to be better to give away a corresponding part of their "crown jewels" to get more of a market share.

Getting your virtualiser into the kernel (or a vendor tree) isn't about control, it's about being in technical pole position to sell copies of their commercial products. Xen might be free, and might have started this all off, but they too have a commercial arm, XenSource, trying to sell Xen Optimizer, presumably as a coda to other products. SWSoft have Plesk, HSPComplete, PEM and others. And VMWare has ESX/GSX server. All of their selling would be made easier, and their marketing departments made very happy, if the king of open source projects, Linux, includes parts of their core technology.

While I'm not sure what the critiera are for acceptance into the kernel, I don't think it's going to happen for SWSoft. From an engineering standpoint, their technology is not much different from Linux vserver which has been around a while to do much the same job and I imagine its invasive kernel changes to keep everything partitioned are just as (un)appealing to kernel maintainers. On the other hand the Xen kernel changes implement a new "architecture", albeit a virtual one, and (last I looked) were only around 150K in size. So I would have thought that the Xen guys have more of a shot at this one because the bulk of their software is maintained outside of the Linux kernel, and seems like the better solution from an engineering standpoint.

But with CPU virtualisation extensions becoming all the rage this year, I think it'll be a while before the best solution shakes itself out engineering-wise: there is still too much vendor "buy-in" for any of these solutions to seem like a good bet for the mainline kernel.

Also NB from the article that SWSoft have made lots of money from selling a modified Linux kernel, and yes for years before OpenVZ they would give out the sources to Virtuozzo licensees. It's not clear to me whether Virtuozzo uses a forked OpenVZ codebase and they are continuing to develop virtuozzo's kernel bits in secret (which would seem like madness on top of running openvz, but that's commerce for you :) ).