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VMware Opens Up API to Partners

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the virtually-a-department dept.

mstansberry writes "This week VMware opens up its source code to its x86 partners, calling it the best mix of open-source and proprietary. While the general public won't get a look at the source code, the likes of IBM, HP, Red Hat and others will. Releasing an API is a way for a company to bring more people into the fold and to get more applications integrated within the platform. But from the looks of last quarter's financial reports, VMware doesn't need much help getting people on board."

265 comments

  1. I wonder if Apple... by daveschroeder · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...will jump on the vmware bandwagon. With Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server (especially Mac OS X Server in the context of what I'm about to discuss) supporting x86, it would be trivially easy to have Mac OS X Server run in a supported fashion in a vmware environment on any variety of hardware. Stay with me for a moment: similar to the impact of soon being able to get an Apple desktop or, especially, laptop system that runs Mac OS X plus any x86 OS, including Windows, in a sure-to-exist virtual machine/vmware-like environment at near-native speed of the underlying hardware, having Mac OS X Server run on vmware in a server environment - somewhat the reverse - would be a huge coup for Apple in the datacenter.

    Yes, yes, we all know that Apple, at least at the outset, will not "allow" Mac OS X to run on non-Apple hardware. Aside from some semi-insane but actually interesting prognostications from John Dvorak (and TPM panic aside), Apple is primarily talking about the desktop/consumer marketplace when it says this. There is little to nothing to stop Apple from partnering with an enterprise x86 vendor (or a partner such as vmware) to provide a vehicle via which to run Mac OS X Server on hardware other than Apple's 1U, single-power-supply Xserve.

    Mac OS X will only run exclusively on Apple hardware as long as its good for Apple. As soon as it becomes desirable to allow Mac OS X (or Mac OS X Server) to run on possible non-Apple hardware configurations, you had better believe they'll do it. That's probably part-and-parcel to this whole x86 transition strategy. Further, consider that individual market segments may be appropriate for this first, such as enterprise datacenter and server markets. Consider also that while Mac OS X is $129 ($69 government and education), Mac OS X Server is $499/$999 ($249/$499 government and education), meaning that Mac OS X Server has a price point much more in line with allowing Mac OS X Server to run sans Apple hardware and still be a profit center. And as it matures, Mac OS X Server is an increasingly powerful, very attractive UNIX server platform, with major commercial vendor support and the best of the open source world wrapped up into one product.

    I see Mac OS X Server on (something like) vmware on non-Apple x86 enterprise server hardware in Apple's future.

    1. Re:I wonder if Apple... by sleeper0 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      While hardware being Apple's main profit center has been the main argument for why OS X wont be running on commodity hardware, there is another substantial sticking point. There have always been back room type deals between microsoft and apple over the office suite, and certainly Jobs making an x86 switch didnt happen without either an understanding or perhaps an explicit agreement over office with microsoft that surely included OS X not running on commodity hardware. It's very unlikely OS X Server could move enough volume for commodity hardware to make up for losing the biggest desktop app there is.

    2. Re:I wonder if Apple... by daveschroeder · · Score: 1

      You might be correct, but I don't think it goes as far as you believe it does. I find it unlikely that there were any specific deals regarding Office before the transition announcement. Further, Microsoft Office for Mac OS X and the Mac Business Unit in general are very profitable for Microsoft. Other than for larger strategic reasons, there is no reason to pull Office for the Mac platform. Now, that said, I don't have any problem believing Microsoft might do just that, just as they killed the IE 6 for Mac project within days of Safari's announcement. However, that raises an interesting parallel: IE development was never what Apple wanted it to be, and wanted to control its own browser fortunes. Hence, Safari was born. IE is now dead on the Mac platform. With Microsoft (finally) going to open formats for all Office documents in the next iteration of Office, why can't Apple do the same thing with an office suite? I know the mindshare blow of losing Microsoft Office would be significant, but what if there were a BETTER alternative, that was 100% compatible with Office? The point is that there are paths Apple could take here, and I don't believe that Apple's current commitment to not allow Mac OS X to run on anything but Apple hardware is a commitment to anything but itself and its current best interests.

    3. Re:I wonder if Apple... by hacker · · Score: 4, Informative
      ...will jump on the vmware bandwagon. With Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server (especially Mac OS X Server in the context of what I'm about to discuss) supporting x86, it would be trivially easy to have Mac OS X Server run in a supported fashion in a vmware environment on any variety of hardware.

      More-importantly, why Apple isn't shipping their "Developer Kits" as VMware .vmdk images instead of on actual hardware. When you simply need to develop/port an application over, and aren't using any hardware-specific calls (SSE3), you can get by with a .vmdk running in VMware instead of on a $999.00 + $1,5000 developer kit and subscription.

      Not only could they reach a wider market of developers who can't afford the $2,499 DevKit cost, but they can also reduce their own operating expenses (and tie the OS tightly to the VMware BIOS if they wanted to). It strikes me as odd why they didn't consider this. People are already hacking the DevKit builds to run in VMware now, successfully.

      Oracle does it, why not Apple?

    4. Re:I wonder if Apple... by rtelfairm · · Score: 1

      I agree wholeheartedly with the Parent's point about the business case for Apple working with VMWare and/or other virtualization technology to allow OS/X Server to run in the datacenter on IBM, Dell, HP, etc., servers.

      Recall the two reasons why Apple does not want to release OS/X [Desktop] for commodity desktop x86 hardware: 1) Apple makes a lot of $$$ on their proprietary hardware -- they want people to keep buying it; and 2) Apple does not want to blow this $$$ or their reputation for a quality OS by being forced to provide support for every conceivable piece of hardware out there -- Steve Jobs knows how much grief Microsoft has endured playing this game. [Contrarian view: Steve Jobs also knows how much money Microsoft has made by offering to support all of that commodity hardware, and not just one closed box.]

      In the datacenter, Apple could allow VMWare et al. to worry about supporting the hardware and the Host OS -- all Apple would have to do is work with VMWare to make sure VMWare presents a faux "Mac" to the OS/X Server installation.

      Then, Apple would be able to collect its licensing fees -- without the cost of competing with IBM, Dell, HP, etc., in new hardware -- and show off its OS technology to win over new converts.

      I hope Steve is thinking along the same lines.

      /rob
    5. Re:I wonder if Apple... by bmorris · · Score: 1

      The real opportunity for Apple with virtualization is not in the enterprise space but on the desktop.

      Everyone seems to think that OS-X on generic hardware is a great idea.
      But Apple can keep their existing business model and take a much larger chunk of the desktop market by offering vitualized Windows on Mac hardware.
      When you can run XP and OS-X concurrently on the same machine, there will be not need to 'switch': run your legacy apps on XP while simultaneously running OS-X.
      No dual-boot necessary.

    6. Re:I wonder if Apple... by jcr · · Score: 1

      I don't have any problem believing Microsoft might do just that, just as they killed the IE 6 for Mac project within days of Safari's announcement.

      MS killed IE for the Mac because it was pointless. They weren't making any money on it (ever), Netscape was already dead, and Safari was superior from day one.

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    7. Re:I wonder if Apple... by Jeff+Hornby · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Three reasons this won't fly:

      The first, as you mentioned is mindshare. No matter how hard Apple tries, their office suite will never be more than marginally noticed by mainstream IT managers.

      The second, and more important, is that writing a full office suite is not a trivial undertaking. The combined person-years that have gone into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook and anything else included in Office would be far beyond the means of Apple to duplicate. And even if they did have that kind of money (and with recent iPod sales, maybe they do), it would still not be as cost effective as the status quo.

      The third reason, realted to the second, is that development of an office suite would take a very long time. Would you buy an Apple if some absolutely necessary piece of software like a word processor wouldn't be available for two to three years? Meaning that every desktop in your company would need to have two computers, one for whatever they could do on the Apple and one for everything else.

      Apple's best hope if Microsoft were to pull support for Office for the Mac (which I doubt they would do) would be to work on OpenOffice until it works with Microsoft's new formats and works very well on the Mac. Only then would they MAYBE have a chance.

      --
      Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
    8. Re:I wonder if Apple... by sleeper0 · · Score: 1

      I think you underestimate the history microsoft has of using Office as their #1 bully pulpit against Apple. It was commonly reported during the browser wars that threats of Office slowdowns in new versions or a withdrawl from the platform altogether were on the table to get Internet Explorer shipping on the Mac over Netscape. Several hours of Gates' testimony to the DOJ during the states case against Microsoft. It was also reportedly used as leverage against quicktime and other technologies. Obviously in the end Apple ended up with Safari, but only long after the browser had stopped being a top priority for Redmond.

      Is Microsoft willing to pull one of their top products from 3% of their market? Obviously I don't know. But it does seem to be clear that they would be as willing or more willing to threaten that type of action over a top notch OS going head to head with Windows as compared to disagreements over IE and Windows Media.

      Could Apple survive without Microsoft? Possibly, though it is clear that Office on the Mac is huge across all of their market segments. It's not just file formats either, it's familiarity for users, feature sets, and homogeneity for corporate environments.

      Either way you look at it, Office or no, Apple producing their OS for the whole installed base of existing and future PC's throws down the gauntlet. Is there enough advantage in selling OS X server to go head to head with the biggest boy on the block? It seems very unlikely.

    9. Re:I wonder if Apple... by esarjeant · · Score: 1

      Apple isn't doing it because they are working with Transitive to build Rosetta for the Mac.

      At this stage, I imagine it would be politically incorrect to switch sides and start supporting VMWare. It might be the easy thing to do, but it may also jeopardize ongoing agreements with another vendor.

      --

      Eric Sarjeant
      eric[@]sarjeant.com

    10. Re:I wonder if Apple... by daveschroeder · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Actually, that's not true.

      IE 6 for Mac was a fully staffed program, and Jimmy Grewal was the program manager. Immediately after the Safari announcement, a decision outside of MacBU was made to kill IE 6 for Mac. Once this was dead, the program manager actually left Microsoft. To repeat: IE 6 for Mac was actually in internal beta, and was a fully staffed project. Right when Safari was announced, it was killed, and it was killed *because* of the Safari announcement.

    11. Re:I wonder if Apple... by hacker · · Score: 1

      You missed my point entirely. I'm not talking about running PowerPC binaries on the Intel/OSX machines (which is precisely what Rosetta does for them).

      I'm talking about providing the Intel builds of OSX in a VMware .vmdk image to developers, instead of providing a $2,499 hardware kit that does the same thing for developers who do not need direct access to the physical hardware to complete their ports.

    12. Re:I wonder if Apple... by daveschroeder · · Score: 1

      Right, that's what I alluded to in my post:

      Now, people will be able to easily buy nice, high-quality Apple hardware, that is essentially a high-end PC, and be able to run Mac OS X as the primary OS in addition to being able to run Windows, Linux variants for x86, etc., in a vmware/Virtual PC-like environment, all at the native speed of the underlying hardware. All seamlessly and all without having to dual-boot. Talk about a dream machine...

    13. Re:I wonder if Apple... by sribe · · Score: 1

      Consider also that while Mac OS X is $129 ($69 government and education), Mac OS X Server is $499/$999 ($249/$499 government and education), meaning that Mac OS X Server has a price point much more in line with allowing Mac OS X Server to run sans Apple hardware and still be a profit center...

      And there's nothing to stop them from charging higher prices for higher-end hardware. I have no idea if they'll do this or not, but if they do I would expect OS X Server to cost more than $999 for a $10k box ;-)

    14. Re:I wonder if Apple... by NullProg · · Score: 1

      The third reason, realted to the second, is that development of an office suite would take a very long time.

      You do realize that Apple wrote "AppleWorks", the first integrated office suite. Its still around, go check out apple.com/appleworks.

      Enjoy,

      --
      It's just the normal noises in here.
    15. Re:I wonder if Apple... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Actually, Appleworks began as a re-branded version of Clarisworks, which actually began as BSWorks, which was written by former Claris employees. When Claris dissolved (and became Filemaker Inc.) Clarisworks became Appleworks. (Although, technically you are still correct, since Claris was the software division of Apple).

    16. Re:I wonder if Apple... by Net0ps · · Score: 1

      I'm particularly interested in the reverse, actually, as are (I'm sure) a number of other people. OS X as a VMWare guest OS (i.e. VMware running OS X under Windows) is useful for server hosting, but VMWare running Windows under OS X has even more possibilities for opening Apple to the enterprise client/desktop market. Forget dual-booting (which really isn't an option for most corporate desktop users), now you can have your OS X environment and still be able to run the few Windows apps you can't [afford, be bothered to] port.

      That, combined with Rosetta, means people can start moving to OS X even faster, and won't have to wait for Windows versions of their applications to be ported to OS X.

    17. Re:I wonder if Apple... by kma · · Score: 1

      There's no problem using SSE3 from within a VM, by the way, assuming your host supports it.

    18. Re:I wonder if Apple... by fodi · · Score: 1

      I know the mindshare blow of losing Microsoft Office would be significant, but what if there were a BETTER alternative, that was 100% compatible with Office?

      Office for Mac isn't even 100% compatible with (Win32) Office... What makes you think they can provide 100% compatibility without MS's help?

      Open Office and Star Office aren't 100% compatible

    19. Re:I wonder if Apple... by TheGavster · · Score: 1

      You're asking why a for-profit company is selling real hardware to developers who *have* to have it, rather than mailing them an image on a CD? When they're over a barrel, it's time to step UP the flogging.

      --
      "Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
    20. Re:I wonder if Apple... by jcr · · Score: 1

      Umm.. What you wrote didn't contradict my statement in any way. IE for the Mac was pointless, once Safari was there.

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    21. Re:I wonder if Apple... by cahiha · · Score: 2, Informative

      It would be more logical for Apple to ship the Intel version of OS X as a Virtual PC image. That way, people could run it on both PPC Macintosh and Windows.

    22. Re:I wonder if Apple... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Apple already has it in the works.

      Saving docs out to XML that is.

    23. Re:I wonder if Apple... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mac OS X will only run exclusively on Apple hardware as long as its good for Apple. As soon as it becomes desirable to allow Mac OS X (or Mac OS X Server) to run on possible non-Apple hardware configurations, you had better believe they'll do it.

      And the next day, no MS Office for Mac. This isn't going to happen anytime soon because Microsoft has them by the balls.

    24. Re:I wonder if Apple... by daveschroeder · · Score: 1

      Sorry; that wasn't clear from what you wrote. It seemed as if you were implying IE 6 was killed for other reasons, rather than directly being killed because of Safari. On this topic, it does prove that Apple can release a product that is superior to one provided by Microsoft: one that is superior AND interoperates properly and plays nice in the real world. Granted, there are still Windows-IE-only webapps, but thankfully, with the rise of Firefox, even those are becoming an rarity.

      I believe that Apple can release a superior complete office suite that is completely Microsoft Office compatible. Granted, the loss of Office would be a blow, but there is no reason, given Microsoft's claimed commitment to moving to completely open document formats with Office, that Apple could not create its own functional, and even superior, suite. With Pages and Keynote so far, it admitted does not seem to be the case, given their priority is definitely not on Office-like behavior and full document compatibility; I'm just noting that it is possible if necessary.

    25. Re:I wonder if Apple... by ezmobius · · Score: 1

      Actually the dev kits cost $999 but the subscription to the ADC is only $500 not $1500 like you said.

    26. Re:I wonder if Apple... by Isbiten · · Score: 1

      Just like OS/2 worked wonders for them, didn't it?

      --
      I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
    27. Re:I wonder if Apple... by Gentlewhisper · · Score: 1

      I'm talking about providing the Intel builds of OSX in a VMware .vmdk image to developers, instead of providing a $2,499 hardware kit that does the same thing for developers who do not need direct access to the physical hardware to complete their ports.

      Because the same machines probably which has a "retail value!" of $2,499 probably costs USD$699 and are "loaned" to the devs for 2 years for a fee of USD$999....

      There is also the issue of no DRM...

      --
      Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
    28. Re:I wonder if Apple... by hacker · · Score: 1
      Actually the dev kits cost $999 but the subscription to the ADC is only $500 not $1500 like you said.

      They must have dropped the price. Select is $500.00 and Premiere is $3,500. The only one that really makes sense (if you're making money selling Apple software; enough money to need the pre-release lease on a DevKit) is Premiere though, bringing the total price to $4,499.

      Ouch.

    29. Re:I wonder if Apple... by Shanep · · Score: 1

      The real opportunity for Apple with virtualization is not in the enterprise space but on the desktop. ... When you can run XP and OS-X concurrently on the same machine

      Apple provided virtual machine software would be a nice option, however I think Apple would be in an even stronger position if their primary focus in this regard would be in API emulation like WINE. This way, Apple users would not have to even run a real Windows OS at all and could have Wintel apps running right next to their Mac OSX apps. If they could do this and retain the ability to cut/copy/paste etc between OSX and Wintel apps, they would have a killer on their hands. If they could also render Wintel apps as best they can as Aqua'fied apps, that would be the bomb (is this possible?).

      I would view virtual machines as a cool option, but as one that should take a back seat to API emulation. With Microsoft locking software installations to particular "verified" machines, this would be even more important because people would have to buy new copies of any software which refuses to work in a virtual machine which does not match the one which that copy of the software is licenced for.

      It was not nice knowing you Microsoft. Burn in fucking hell.

      --
      War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
    30. Re:I wonder if Apple... by 1110110001 · · Score: 1

      More-importantly, why Apple isn't shipping their "Developer Kits" as VMware .vmdk images instead of on actual hardware.
      [...]
      Oracle does it, why not Apple?


      Easy. They don't want everyone to have it. It's easy to copy a .vmdk, but not a real machine. No P2P, no bittorrent.

      And Oracle can do it because they have a different user base. No kiddies or such people.

      b4n

    31. Re:I wonder if Apple... by NullProg · · Score: 1

      Never responded to an AC before now.
      Actually, Appleworks began as a re-branded version of Clarisworks, which actually began as BSWorks, which was written by former Claris employees.

      No, Appleworks came from Apple originally. It ran on the ][, the ][+, and the ][e. It was made by Apple and only later did it become the Clarisworks (Apple spinoff) stepchild that we know today. I have the original 1.0 and 2.0 floppies.

      Byte me and enjoy.

      --
      It's just the normal noises in here.
  2. Bootable USB? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Good, I hope one of these companies has an interest in modifying VMware's BIOS so it can boot an OS from a USB device (USB-FDD/USB-HDD/USB-ZIP). That is one missing feature that really irks me.

    1. Re:Bootable USB? by Kwelstr · · Score: 1

      Well, wouldn't that make the whole system insecure?

      As in, anybody could bring their own USB bootable hd to any computer and gain access... Or am I missing something here?

      --


      ~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s :-/
    2. Re:Bootable USB? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Isochronus USB transfers would be better. I have yet to see a webcam that works through VMware.

    3. Re:Bootable USB? by millwall · · Score: 1

      No, it wouldn't. Within a virtual machine, you can only access the file on the host machine that contain your virtual machine's "harddisk". You can't access files on the host machine itself.

    4. Re:Bootable USB? by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      I think the parent is trying to make the point of being able to store VM files on a USB stick and be able to run those files from that location. If you're working on a VM at your PC and decide to switch over to your laptop, it's just moving the USB stick over.

    5. Re:Bootable USB? by Cromac · · Score: 1
      Well, wouldn't that make the whole system insecure?

      As in, anybody could bring their own USB bootable hd to any computer and gain access... Or am I missing something here?

      They can already do it with a floppy or CD so this wouldn't make it any less secure. I'm sure the bios would have the same options to disable booting from USB as it does for CD and floppy.

      If someone has physical access to the machine you can't get 100% security anyway.

    6. Re:Bootable USB? by LV-427 · · Score: 1

      Well, if that's the case then it already supports it because that's what I'm doing right now. I have a 40Gb portable USB hard drive with a Win XP VMWare image sitting in a folder on it. I just plug it in, start VMWare, and it boots the OS from the USB drive.

    7. Re:Bootable USB? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That isn't booting from a USB drive, booting from a USB drive would involve VMWare reading the boot sector of the USB drive and boot whatever OS is on the drive. Sure VMWare can boot from an image file, but that isn't real helpful if you want to boot a Linux install from an external USB drive.

    8. Re:Bootable USB? by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      That's what I'm doing too with VMware. I guess I got confused as to what the parent was saying. I been trying to get an old laptop to boot off of a 64MB compact flash card and compact flash IDE adapter. The laptop might be too old for that.

    9. Re:Bootable USB? by nahpets77 · · Score: 1

      VMWare allows you to setup samba so that you can access all the files on your computer.

    10. Re:Bootable USB? by OS24Ever · · Score: 1

      I really doubt it. I'm betting this focus is in the lucrative server side fo the business and not the workstation part. The servers are being bundled with ESX and GSX from IBM and now from HP. Booting a USB device on a server VM isn't high on the request list.

      --

      As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.

  3. Does anyone remember... by Poromenos1 · · Score: 1

    that emulator which was supposed to emulate any OS/architecture on any other and run at near realtime? What happened to that?

    --
    Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
    1. Re:Does anyone remember... by leandrod · · Score: 1
      that emulator which was supposed to emulate any OS/architecture on any other and run at near realtime?

      That piece of vapourware that turned out to be just a straight copy of PearPC?

      --
      Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
      DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
      GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
    2. Re:Does anyone remember... by Poromenos1 · · Score: 1

      No, it had a name that sounded like an english word and it was supposed to be embedded in programs to make them able to run on any platform... I can't find it on Google and I can't remember the name, it was a few months ago.

      --
      Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
    3. Re:Does anyone remember... by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 1

      that emulator which was supposed to emulate any OS/architecture on any other and run at near realtime? What happened to that?

      It's called rosetta now and will be running PPC native binaries on MacOS X for x86.

    4. Re:Does anyone remember... by bloggins02 · · Score: 5, Funny

      I believe it will come bundled with Duke Nukem Forever

    5. Re:Does anyone remember... by allanw · · Score: 1

      Xen?

    6. Re:Does anyone remember... by Poromenos1 · · Score: 1

      No... Gah, this is driving me crazy. I had read an article about it in a PC magazine and it was too good to be true, so I googled it and I found a few press releases, but no demo/code in sight at the time. It was probably vapourware but I'll burst if I don't remember the name. Maybe as another poster said it is rosetta now, but I don't think so, it wasn't Apple's. What was rosetta called before?

      --
      Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
    7. Re:Does anyone remember... by varmittang · · Score: 1

      Its Mac OS X's Rosetta now. Read one of the other posts to your original thread.

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    8. Re:Does anyone remember... by varmittang · · Score: 1

      Transmeta is what I think it was called before. http://www.transmeta.com/

      Sorry, hit reply too soon last time.

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    9. Re:Does anyone remember... by loudgazelle · · Score: 0

      The company's name is Tranitive, but I don't believe they have a trade name for their software.

      Rosetta is just what Apple is calling the version they're providing with OS X-86.

    10. Re:Does anyone remember... by Otter · · Score: 1
      No... Gah, this is driving me crazy.

      I know what you're talking about -- now it's driving me crazy too! It was hyped here a few times, years ago. As you say, its name was an English word...

      Was it NachOS? I think that's the right name, although I'm not sure if this is the same project.

      --
      What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
    11. Re:Does anyone remember... by Glooty-Us-Maximus · · Score: 1

      Xen, while faster than VMWare, implements paravirtualization instead of full virtualization. Operating systems must be ported to Xen to run on Xen (though apparently the ports aren't too complicated). The ported OSs will run unmodified binaries though.

    12. Re:Does anyone remember... by Poromenos1 · · Score: 1

      Yes! I'm fairly sure that's it, QuickTransit. So rosetta is a version of Transitive's QuickTransit? Then it's not vapourware after all...

      --
      Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
    13. Re:Does anyone remember... by loudgazelle · · Score: 0

      Yes, it's the The brains behind Apple's Rosetta.

      There are some other links on the Transitive Home Page about Apple using it for Rosetta.

    14. Re:Does anyone remember... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Until the next version of Xen comes out and you have a x86_64 CPU. Then you can run at native speeed.

  4. VMWare is owned by EMC by mrm677 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How does VMWare fit into EMC's strategic interests? I'm surprised that Apple didn't buy VMWare when they had the chance because with the move to x86 hardware, having VMWare part of OS/X would be killer.

    1. Re:VMWare is owned by EMC by Ingolfke · · Score: 1

      How does VMWare fit into EMC's strategic interests?

      VMWare enables virtualization of servers, which means larger servers with larger centralized/conslidated storage requirements (typically SAN). EMC's major strength is storage. VMWare is also simply a great product that obviously make EMC a nice profit which they can use for other strategic initiatives.

    2. Re:VMWare is owned by EMC by jhoger · · Score: 1

      Since the purchase by EMC, their new business model is helping companies consolidate several virtual servers onto one machine, and to be able to move virtual servers easily off of broken hardware quickly. They still sell the Workstation product though.

    3. Re:VMWare is owned by EMC by LinuxHam · · Score: 1

      I'm surprised that Apple didn't buy VMWare

      APPLE?!?!?! IBM was the sure bet before EMC stepped in to scoop them up. I was close to the talks.

      --
      Intelligent Life on Earth
    4. Re:VMWare is owned by EMC by superpulpsicle · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I never understood this acquisition by EMC. The whole virtualization thing in SAN is far from the OS level. You want to see virtualization in storage, look at HDS tagmastore. This vmware thing was the biggest publicity stun, they are just trying to bounce back from the 90s dominance which they are clearly loosing grip on.

      The OS emulation part of vmware workstation really has nothing to do with storage. All the other products are overkill. Which is what EMC does best, sell you way more software than you need. In the end people end up with HDS, HP.

    5. Re:VMWare is owned by EMC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      In the end people end up with HDS, HP.

      You're kidding, right?

      Where I've worked almost everyone uses EMC storage, and keep getting more. See this:

      http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/21/emc_q2/

    6. Re:VMWare is owned by EMC by McSpew · · Score: 4, Informative

      EMC's acquisition of VMWare was all about getting into the server virtualization market. EMC could already virtualize storage, but the trend lately is for server consolidation. Instead of putting 8-10 1U servers in a rack, you can put an 8-way 7U box in a rack and run 8-10 virtual servers on it. Now imagine having a rack full of 8-way servers emulating an entire server farm of 1U machines.

      VMWare's server virtualization stuff allows you to move a virtual server from one physical server to another while the VM is running. This is potent stuff. Couple virtualized servers with virtualized storage and you have a powerful argument for EMC's SANs in more datacenters.

    7. Re:VMWare is owned by EMC by Donny+Smith · · Score: 1

      >The whole virtualization thing in SAN is far from the OS level.
      >The OS emulation part of vmware workstation really has nothing to do with storage.

      On the contrary - every OS has a system disk (and probably some data disks too). If you have an app that makes it easy to move shitloads of OS to EMC (boot from SAN for the OS part + virtualizable storage provisioning for the data part), it's of course a very attractive combo.

      As the other response to your post said, it's very convenient to provide a disk array with a single (or clustered) VMWare box which provides Physical 2 Virtual storage and server consolidation.

      > In the end people end up with HDS, HP.

      TagmaStor (the original high end version) is what you really can call overkill (except for the largest sites). The recent mid-end editions are a bit more reasonable.
      HP storage? Oh, well, they barely managed to pull a refresh of what they've inherited from Compaq.

    8. Re:VMWare is owned by EMC by Locutus · · Score: 1

      EMC's management software is JAVA on Windows and so it's likely that they were finding they could only manage one or two SAN systems at a time before Microsoft Windows crashed. Now, they can manage a much larger number of systems from one Microsoft Windows PC running many VM sessions. ;-)

      My guess is that because Windows sucks so bad at server resource utilization, they purchased VMWare to expand out from the SAN market. After all, SAN gets them in the server room already. Microsoft followed them quickly with the purchase of VirtualPC. And all THIS came from the fact that organizations were learning that one LinuxPC could run the database, print server, email server, and intranet webserver when it took 4 WindowsPCs to do the same tasks. Eight if they wanted the same uptime( via redundency ).

      LoB

      --
      "Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
    9. Re:VMWare is owned by EMC by Phishcast · · Score: 1
      Not sure about the +5 Insightful here. SAN virtualization isn't as far from the OS level as you might thing.

      The OS emulation part of vmware workstation really has nothing to do with storage.

      Perhaps not for VMWare Workstation. EMC was probably a lot more interested in the VMWare ESX Server product. See VMWare's VMotion. Moving live virtual servers from one physical server to another without downtime. This is a beautiful thing if you've ever managed a large server farm. Oh, and it requires a SAN back end.

    10. Re:VMWare is owned by EMC by sherold · · Score: 1

      "Oh, and it requires a SAN back end"

      You got that right. Not only does VMotion require a SAN backend, but 95% of the ESX implementations use all SAN storage on the back end. Using P2V, you take a physical server that was content on running on 36GB of local Disk and you move that onto your SAN infrastructure. I have had clients that have purchased up to 72TB just to support a Windows Server virtualization project. Not a bad move by EMC at all... I'm surprised they have let VMware ESX remain as vendor agnostic as they have...

      Scott Herold

    11. Re:VMWare is owned by EMC by Apparition-X · · Score: 1

      Well, full disclosure: I work for EMC. Having said that, let me respond to your statement about "losing grip" on 90s dominance. EMC has achieved 11 straight quarters of double digit growth. Last quarter revenue grew 19%. EMC is clearly #1 by market share. In fact, there is an article here: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug 2005/tc2005084_5865_tc024.htm that well sums up the solid financial and market share position EMC is in. I don't want to debate the merits of EMC technology here--this isn't the time or place. But your statement seemed to imply a dying on the vine (or mediocre achievement at best) for EMC, which is factually not the case.

    12. Re:VMWare is owned by EMC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So I can use a 7U box to take the place of 8 1U boxes? Gee, that's... great. What a savings. One whole U.

    13. Re:VMWare is owned by EMC by DigitalRover · · Score: 1

      With ESX Server, VMotion, and an EMC SAN you can do some cool things like seamlessly move a virtual machine from one piece of physical hardware to the next.

    14. Re:VMWare is owned by EMC by rikkards · · Score: 1

      Slightly off topic. Anyone had any experience with P2V which is vmWares tool for migrating a physical machine into a Virtual one?

  5. Nice. by alaeth · · Score: 2, Insightful

    VMware is probably one of the most useful QA products out there. Nice to see them open it up for 3rd party vendors to play with. Anyone else use VMware 5? Gotta love the new snapshotting features.

    --
    Sig goes here.
    1. Re:Nice. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      VMWare really produces a great product. In my case, I run linux, but admin many windows and linux desktop/server machines and using VMWare allows me to boot up windows to help someone or make a nice realistic server test environment or just learn a new OS like Solaris.

      Also, there service is great and for students I definitely suggest asking about the student discount if you want to have a good place to play around. While in college I spent the $129.00 US to do so and had a place to try out everything I wanted including all the programs for my networking class (Just network 4 or 5 virtual machines).

    2. Re:Nice. by th3axe · · Score: 1

      Oh yeah. Built out an entire test Exchange messaging system. Snapshotted it, did Service Pack 2 installs, test backup/restores. Suuweeeet. I was actually able to document things properly for once since I wasn't playing in a production environment and was able to repeat the process to validate the docs. Of course, the question is - will people actually read the doc?

      However, I've had some trouble with starting the VMs using the local system accounts and viewing the desktop. I think there's a fix for it, but I haven't worked too hard at it since I usually RDP to the server systems anyway.

      --
      "It's real and we can touch it, so least we know where we stand." - Jack Burton
    3. Re:Nice. by imemyself · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I couldn't live without VMware. I have probably maybe 30 OS's(Lin/Win/*nix/Netware) installed in VMWare Workstation, and I use GSX on a small server. IMO they are some of the most useful software apps out there. And being able to run it on Linux is really nice. :)

      --
      Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
    4. Re:Nice. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I used it to VM XPpro on a FC1 install with modest x86 hardware.

      Very simple, and it worked the first time.

      Very, very cool stuff for cross-platform testing.

      In a properly tuned server environment, it has great potential.

      And VMware will simply rework their product to the new CPUs that allow for direct virtualization.

      At this point, their offering is FAR more advanced than Xen, configuration wise at least.

      If Xen's ease of use problems can be solved, it will fare better.

  6. Doublespeak by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So by "best mix of open-source and proprietary", they mean "not open-source at all".

    1. Re:Doublespeak by Marc2k · · Score: 1

      Uh, no. Wrong. This is "open source", actually..sort of. It's open source in the sense that, if you are a partner of VMWare, you're given royalty-free access to the source code, with the ability to share your modified code with the original codebase pool, and/or redistribute your modified code to your buyers, albeit only in binary form. So it *is* open source, at a certain level. It's just not 'viral', in fact, explicitly not so, I'd imagine (i.e. you're prohibited from distributing your modified source).

      So again, it's open source, just not to the end-user. Nothing's stopping you from being granted access to the VMWare source code, except for your [probable] inability to move a large number of VMWare units. It's still in the open source spirit (just not GPL) if I sell you some software, give you the source, then contractually prohibit you from redistributing the source or binary forms of the code. Similarly, they're just rearranging the definition of 'buy' to 'resell', and limiting your ability to release source as a reseller. Sounds like a "mix of open-source and proprietary" to me.

      Of course, 'best' is a subjective term here..

      --
      --- What
    2. Re:Doublespeak by Adult+film+producer · · Score: 1

      Uhm, Microsoft supplies their source to a number of partners & certain government agencies.. nobody is calling what they offer "Open Source" though. Maybe it should be called "Shared** Source" instead.. heh, sounds familiar right

    3. Re:Doublespeak by timeOday · · Score: 4, Informative
      This is "open source", actually..sort of. It's open source in the sense that, if you are a partner of VMWare, you're given royalty-free access to the source code, with the ability to share your modified code with the original codebase pool, and/or redistribute your modified code to your buyers, albeit only in binary form.
      In other words, it's not open. Look, ANY company will share code with other companies so long as the IP is protected by contracts and enough money changes hands. That's simply not what "open" means.
    4. Re:Doublespeak by Ktistec+Machine · · Score: 1
      That's simply not what "open" means.

      No, they're just using the old-IT definition of open, where it means sharing your APIs with a cadre of like-minded plutocrats for the more efficient exploitation of the masses. See "openVMS", for example.

    5. Re:Doublespeak by bsquizzato · · Score: 1

      One of the advantages of open source projects is that anyone can contribute to the project and so you often have a lot of people submitting code and ideas, making the application better over time with this collective development and knowledge. So opening up the code to other companies like this kind of achieves that same goal.

    6. Re:Doublespeak by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...and the other 0.000001% is Udder Carp.

  7. VMware by skintigh2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    In case you were wondering, VMware is an application that lets you run several virtual machines on one host machine, and even set up a virtual network of those machines and bridge it to the real world if you want, allowing honeynets and the such.

    I hate headlines that list some alphabet soup without explaining what the heck it is. I read about 2 years of RSS headlines before seeing an article that mentioned what RSS was.

    1. Re:VMware by SlayerofGods · · Score: 1

      As always google has the answer.
      define:VMWare
      define:RSS

      --

      Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
    2. Re:VMware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In case you were wondering, the above post is a good example of karma whoring, an activity that is frowned upon at slashdot.

      (Because, you know, people can't look "vmware" up on google to find out what it is if they dont' know.)

    3. Re:VMware by pvxhound · · Score: 1

      Have to agree with your sentiments. My first job's prime directive was don't baffle the users with acronymns. So please don't keep us in suspense. What is RSS again?

    4. Re:VMware by skintigh2 · · Score: 1

      In case you were wondering, anyone can do anything on their own, eventually. When someone does it for them it is called "being helpful."

    5. Re:VMware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      when text space is at a premium, and you're already on the net, not googling is stupid....

      especially staying in the dark about something as ubiquitous as RSS for two years....

    6. Re:VMware by ch-chuck · · Score: 1

      Ok, that's the what. Now the why: why would I want to run 4 VM's on one AMD 3200+ instead of 4 old 800Mhz PC's with 100mbps ethernet?

      --
      try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
    7. Re:VMware by PaxTech · · Score: 1

      I hate headlines that list some alphabet soup without explaining what the heck it is. I read about 2 years of RSS headlines before seeing an article that mentioned what RSS was.

      There's this newfangled thing we techies call "Google" that can answer these kinds of questions. Maybe you've heard of it.

      --
      All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
    8. Re:VMware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Because if I want to run 12 vm's to test my software on different linus distros I can.

      VMWare is the best qc and dev environment, because I am no longer limited to the number of physical boxes I own.

    9. Re:VMware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      On the other hand, when you see an incomprehensible write-up that consists of an alphabet soup of unexplained abbreviations, it is a reasonable response to simply skip it. Or maybe complain about the obtuseness in the article. There isn't time enough in the world to look up everything you come across.

      I also kept seeing poorly explained references to RSS for a long time before I finally concluded that people seem to find it useful, and then spent an afternoon looking the concept up and trying out a couple of Firefox RSS extensions. My conclusion was that I didn't see much advantage in them, as compared to checking out a few websites manually. Of course, if you find RSS useful, I'm sure you are right, in your own case.

    10. Re:VMware by Tony+Hoyle · · Score: 1

      So how do I find out what google is?

      google for it?

    11. Re:VMware by skintigh2 · · Score: 1

      1) Space is hardly at a premium
      2) Generally, never use an abbreviation without defining it.
      3) When I see a headline/blurb made up of alphabet soup and nothing else, I am not interested enough to bother looking up what the headline/blurb means.
      4) Google is blocked at my company unless I log into my MIS machine -- my 3.2GHz, 19" LCD email reader that wont let me install a real browser, change IE's homepage or even remove icons from the desktop.

    12. Re:VMware by skintigh2 · · Score: 1

      Because:
      Space
      Power
      Heat
      Usability: I can build a honeynet, let hackers trash it, and restore the who thing in minutes. I suppose I could do the same with live discs and a big KVM switch, but this is more flexible.
      Besides, it's cooler this way. And sadly, that really matters when impressing management... Show a manager a USB pocket drive, no big deal. Show him a watch with a USB drive and suddenly you have to change every single security procedure.

    13. Re:VMware by sickofthisshit · · Score: 1

      Because the 3200+ machine is 1/4 the size (and 1/2 the power consumption) of 4 800 MHz PCs, you don't need a KVM switch, the AMD box is probably using GBit Enet, instead of 4x100 MBps, has 100s of GB of hard disk, instead of a few GB, and the box is brand new, and under warranty, and not ready to croak.

    14. Re:VMware by ch-chuck · · Score: 1

      Besides, it's cooler this way. And sadly, that really matters when impressing management..

      Well, coolness matters - the mgmt where I'm working are moving toward vmware to replace a bunch of individual servers - I just chalk it up to the mainframe mentality in operation as they all come from the big iron days. Personally I like diversified clusters of many small boxes - when one fails it's a small hit. But when you've massive vmware blade server goes down, admittedly rare, it takes everything. Anyway, interesting that the trend these days is back toward big centralized boxes that look like a bunch of units, instead of small distributed boxes combined into one big unit.

      --
      try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
    15. Re:VMware by elBart0 · · Score: 1

      I've used VMWare pretty extensively in development and QA environments. We have systems that in production require 5-6 servers (2 for oracle, 2 for web servers, 1 for an app server). With VMWare images of these systems, I can start up and entire environment, break it, and have a whole new copy of the environment up and running in not a lot of time. I can also take a snapshot of an in development system, start up those VMs and let end users see a system in development, while not letting them on my actual development setup. When they're done, I just shut down the VMs. All on two boxes. Pretty easy from my perspective.I've used VMWare pretty extensively in development and QA environments. We have systems that in production require 5-6 servers (2 for oracle, 2 for web servers, 1 for an app server). With VMWare images of these systems, I can start up and entire environment, break it, and have a whole new copy of the environment up and running in not a lot of time. I can also take a snapshot of an in development system, start up those VMs and let end users see a system in development, while not letting them on my actual development setup. When they're done, I just shut down the VMs. All on two boxes. Pretty easy from my perspective.

      --
      09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
    16. Re:VMware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ask a friend.

    17. Re:VMware by deepestblue · · Score: 1

      Have you heard of this great new idea called "search engine"? Apparently this technology, also called Googol or something, helps you find answers to any question you may have. Instantly!

  8. Not very exciting by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Insightful
    VMWare is opening its API up to partners? It's a typical NDA agreement between companies. Not very exciting and not worthy of a press release - except for the fact that they don't have another way to generate buzz around Linuxworld. Meanwhile Xen is gaining ground, is a technically better approach, and is real Open Source. VMWare? Yawn.

    Bruce

    --
    Bruce Perens.
    1. Re:Not very exciting by andersbergh · · Score: 5, Informative

      Xen requires the guest OS to be ported though. So Xen can't run XP, and other OS's because they are never going to be ported..

    2. Re:Not very exciting by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Yes, the other virtual machine programs spoof the hosted OS by emulating the interrupt controller and some other hardware. This code for the most part already exists in other Open Source projects, and if someone wants it enough, it could be added to Xen. It would never be the optimal path for hosting an OS, though. Porting the OS makes it run better.

      XP is an interesting question. It already has a microkernel that it uses for DRM, called the NIB. You could probably host it by emulating that.

      Bruce

      --
      Bruce Perens.
    3. Re:Not very exciting by ghee22 · · Score: 0

      how dare you speak against bruce perens That's Bruce PERENS! Are you MAD, man?

      --
      "Persistence is annoying success." - ghee22 11:28:1999 - 10:53:PM
    4. Re:Not very exciting by hattig · · Score: 1

      Xen will be able to run XP, etc, when hardware virtualisation is supported - namely by Intel and AMD (Vanderpool and Pacifica respectively). It certainly isn't standing still!

    5. Re:Not very exciting by ngrier · · Score: 1

      Actually, if you read TFA, you'll see that they're opening their source code. This is a notable step. (Although not that surprising given that 1) they've released parts of their software for some time and 2) ESX server is based on linux.)

    6. Re:Not very exciting by The+Bungi · · Score: 1
      VMWare? Yawn.

      I always expect to see these types of things from the usual slashbots, but I'm surprised someone like you would actually do a "wake me up when i can download the code, yawn" post.

      In any case, between the endless "M$" flamebait, the dupes, the hoaxes, the OSNews|cNet regurgitations, the Apple fanboy epigrams, the-sky-is-falling "YRO" crap and the pointless "unknown project on Freshmeat reached 0.0.002 today!" articles, what do you expect? This is newsworthy insofar as nothing else on Slasdhot is. Or did you set up Technocrat.net because you thought Slashdot was cool?

      Yawn indeed.

    7. Re:Not very exciting by hattig · · Score: 1

      Also you might want to look up the addresses of the University of Cambridge Computer Lab (Xen) and Microsoft Research UK. I bet that XP doesn't run on Xen for marketing reasons, not because it hasn't been ported.

    8. Re:Not very exciting by rpfuller · · Score: 1

      It has indeed been ported. (Was some time ago.)

      http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/ states "A port of Windows XP was developed for an earlier version of Xen, but is not available for release due to licence restrictions."

    9. Re:Not very exciting by Quirk · · Score: 1
      from the Xen homepage:

      "A port of Windows XP was developed for an earlier version of Xen, but is not available for release due to licence restrictions."

      MS was involved in the development of Xen as were other industry heavyweights. As usual MicroSoft decided to take its toy Virtual PC home and play with itself.

      Perhaps OS will win out because by way of an evolutionary analogy OS relies on a sort of sexual cross pollinization to evolve; whereas corporations are like giant eunuchs that only feed the growth of others when they are cannabilized by their own kind.

      just a thought

      --
      "Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
      Cohen
    10. Re:Not very exciting by loudgazelle · · Score: 2, Informative
      Although everyone seems to think it is, ESX Server is NOT based on Linux. It provides a Linux console on top of it's Proprietary Kernel so that the admin can interact with the machine, but the kernel is not a Linux/Unix derivative.

      From http://www.ibm.qassociates.co.uk/vmware-esx-server -faqs.htm
      Previously believed to be impossible to implement on Intel hardware architecture, VMware's breakthrough virtualization technology is based on advanced systems research conducted by the VMware engineering team. VMware's patented and patent-pending technology serves as the foundation for VMware ESX Server; it is not derived from Linux or FreeBSD.
    11. Re:Not very exciting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He did read the article. You didn't read his post.

      They are opening up the source code under NDA. Microsoft will do the same with Windows source code to select people too.

      As Bruce said, there is nothing to see here. The only differnece is that the parties involved are probably more agreeable, ideologically, than Microsoft.

    12. Re:Not very exciting by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 4, Informative

      Intel and AMD are introducing new virtualisation-aware chips that'll fix this though. Code (and test machines) have been contributed by Intel to the Xen project (AMD is following suit), so xen-unstable already boots unmodified OSes (not quite Windows yet but it should work soon).

      The idea is that Windows will run with good performance in a fully virtualised guest. Once a fully-virtualised guest is up and running, Xen-aware disk and network drivers will be installed within it to boost the performance even more.

      In the future, it *might* be possible to fake out the MS paravirtualisation APIs under Xen to get better performance for Windows (depending on licensing and the achievable performance benefits).

      For the immediate future, Win4Lin recently announced official support for running W4L Pro on Xen.

    13. Re:Not very exciting by justins · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Meanwhile Xen is gaining ground, is a technically better approach, and is real Open Source. VMWare? Yawn.

      Yawn? Some of us need a product with VMWare's features, rather than a product that might have VMWare's features eventually, if enough bored teenagers are somehow inspired to hack on the code.
      --
      Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
    14. Re:Not very exciting by WindBourne · · Score: 1

      actually, it would be better to create a modified shell just for that. No sense killing all the other VMs just because Windows does not wish to play nice. It would be an interesting way to allow for Windows apps to run on Linux.

      --
      I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
    15. Re:Not very exciting by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 2
      I understand that you need it Tuesday, and you are welcome to pay VMWare for those features. This doesn't change the fact that the announcement isn't news.

      Thanks

      Bruce

      --
      Bruce Perens.
    16. Re:Not very exciting by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 1
      VMWare would not come in for this sort of posting had they not said that they were making the "best combination of Open Source and proprietary", and then released something that appears to contain no Open Source at all. It would be a disservice to the community and the reader to refrain from pushing back on that sort of PR.

      I agree that there isn't much news to be had here. Fortunately, I don't have to fix that problem too.

      Thanks

      Bruce

      --
      Bruce Perens.
    17. Re:Not very exciting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The port limitation isn't going to be around a whole lot longer. In the next few months both AMD and Intel are going to be shipping with real virtualization extensions in the processor, at that point Xen will be able to run unmodified OS's. VMWare becomes little more than a pretty face.

    18. Re:Not very exciting by kevcol · · Score: 1

      It looks to me like the submitter, who is also the author of the linked article, is the one guilty of the phrase "best combination of Open Source and proprietary" and only in the /. submission. It doesn't appear in the article itself. In another article, VMWare specifically shies away from commenting on OS as a business model.

      So I am not certain that the phrase you object to was not a tech writer attempt to push a boundry that the company was not doing itself.

    19. Re:Not very exciting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Xen may be technically better, but that doesn't help a shop needing Windows XP running on it. Not supporing an OS on a sizable chunk of computers out there to me is more then a "minor detail"

    20. Re:Not very exciting by interiot · · Score: 1

      IBM, AMD, and Intel are all contributing to Xen (both money and code). This is, I would assume, precisely the reason that VMWare is now opening up its code to these same kinds of companies.

    21. Re:Not very exciting by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 1

      HP have contributed code and a port to IA-64 and offered machines also (yey! toys for us :-), Sun haven't contributed to the core code but are porting OpenSolaris, XenSource is (obviously) backing Xen too...

      Ummmm, can't think of any other players right now but there probably are some more. Sun, IBM and (maybe) HP are talking about shipping Xen on their systems *in flash* so that they boot natively into Xen.

    22. Re:Not very exciting by strikethree · · Score: 1

      ever tried qemu? now add kqemu http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/kqemu-doc.html into the mix and you have something that is pretty much comparable to vmware.

      strike

      --
      "Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
    23. Re:Not very exciting by kma · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yes, the other virtual machine programs spoof the hosted OS by emulating the interrupt controller and some other hardware. This code for the most part already exists in other Open Source projects, and if someone wants it enough, it could be added to Xen.

      Reality check, Bruce. You have absolutlely no idea what you're talking about here, ok? If it were all this easy, somebody would have gotten around to it by now. Go ask the Xen guys what's involved in running unmodified OS'es, and they'll tell you that porting PIC emulation code from Bochs is a pimple on the ass of this bull of a problem.

    24. Re:Not very exciting by RITjobbie · · Score: 2, Interesting

      VT and Pacifica (from Intel and AMD, respectively) are pretty neat technologies that I have just learned more about while sitting through a few Xen conference sessions and tutorials at Linux World San Francisco this week.

      In usual x86 programming, the OS gets a set of protected instructions called "ring 0". Other less priviliged processes get higher rings.

      In Xen 2.wang, the Xen hypervisor has no way of giving the OS ring 0. The OS has to be aware of what is going on and that it is being virtualized, i.e. no Windows XP on Xen.

      With Xen 3.whatever and a VT or Pacifica platform, the OS is again given ring 0, but the OS has no idea that there is a ring -1--that is where the Xen hypervisor runs.

      I haven't had a chance to test it yet due to lack of hardware. Also, due to the VMWare EULA, nobody can publicly provide benchmark data against, say, my ESX cluster...

      ~Jay from SF

    25. Re:Not very exciting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Only if you want to run Xen on a system with a CPU that doesn't offer virtualization support. At the moment that's all you can do but it's about to change, and soon: the upcoming 9000 series of Itanium 2 CPUs (codenamed Montecito, currently distributed to OEMs for testing) supports Intel's Vanderpool technology (VT) which means that you can use Xen to run unmodified operating systems, efficiently. In other words, upgrade your Itanium system to a 9xxx CPU, update your firmware, and you can run Linux, HP-UX, OpenVMS and even Windows Advanced Server (cringe) on the same box, at the same time.

      This is not vapour: the code has been in the open source Xen repository for some months now. VMware are cutting their losses now because they are about to lose bigtime; with Intel, HP and now even AMD all contributing code to Xen to support their hardware virtualization extensions, VMware will be but a fading memory five years from now, I guarantee it.

      Let me give you a taste of what becomes possible with Xen that you can't do with VMware. You know how if you right click on a URL in xchat, it lets you choose how to open a new mozilla window/process/whatever? I've added another option: "Run in sandbox" - when I right-click on a URL and choose that, I fork a completely new Linux environment running under Xen, complete with its own disk space, bandwidth and access restrictions, not to mention the fact that it runs in a completely seperate memory space. That means that no matter what security flaw might be found (or even deliberately planted) in mozilla that could be exploited by whatever website I'm about to visit, the damage will be completely contained to the new virutalized system I just spawned, and conversely, no information would be made available to mozilla (security leaks or whatever) which were not in the virtualized system to begin with (as you can imagine, not much, it's just a sandbox).

      OK, I've rambled enough, let me get to the point: the difference between Xen and VMware is speed: I don't notice any slowdown when doing my Xen-xchat thing, because the time it takes to fork a new environment is just a small fraction of a second (I haven't timed it, but I am guessing around 0.2 seconds here), less than the time it takes a fresh mozilla process to start anyway. VMware, on the other hand, takes _ages_ to start a new environment: more than 10 seconds on my machine.

      IOW, Xen lets you play around with short-lived virtual machines for whatever security/load balancing/etc reason you might have around 50x faster than VMware. Again, I haven't properly measured, but I would bet good money that the real figure is higher still. There are times when quantitative differences become qualitative ones, and let me tell you, Xen is one of them.

    26. Re:Not very exciting by antoinjapan · · Score: 1

      Newer chips from intel and amd will probably enable xen to work without modifying the OS.
      http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=167600468

    27. Re:Not very exciting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It provides a Linux console on top of it's Proprietary Kernel

      Apostrophes do not mean "here comes an S".

    28. Re:Not very exciting by rikkards · · Score: 1

      Strange, last year I sat through a presentation on ESX sponsored by IBM and they said otherwise although it was a customized kernel. Plus when they booted it up it sure looked like a Linux Kernel bootscreen down to saying it was a 2.6 kernel.

      They must have changed sometime between then and now

    29. Re:Not very exciting by loudgazelle · · Score: 0

      For as long as I've been using it (about 2 years) they've used a Redhat bootloader.
      The console that you interface with is linux, but the VMWare kernel that provides all the VMWare functionality is proprietary, not a modified Linux kernel.

    30. Re:Not very exciting by andersbergh · · Score: 1

      Yes, AMD's Pacifica and Intel's Vanderpool. I wonder if they will ship in laptops..

  9. Too little too late by Mensa+Babe · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's great news. The only problem is that today with enterprise-ready UML, Xen et al. we serious computer scientists no longer need VMware being any more open to begin with. You missed the first train so don't beat the dead horse now.

    --
    Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
    1. Re:Too little too late by alecks · · Score: 1

      Except neither of the two you mentioned work with windows

      --
      The Digital Couture Collection
    2. Re:Too little too late by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      neither of the two you mentioned work with windows

      Yeah! And they have other features too!

    3. Re:Too little too late by Donny+Smith · · Score: 2, Informative

      >with enterprise-ready UML,

      Enterprise? Ready? UML? Nice joke.

      > Xen et al.

      Another enterprise ready virtualization technology!
      So many free, enterprise-ready virtualization technologies, so litle time....

      In real life VMWare has a great advantage over the competitors; it's stable, mature, supports heterogenous OS, snapshots and the latest Clariion's virtualization features can be combined with VMWare's features (don't ask me how, I just read the press release; I guess VMWare can make use of Clariion's virtualization features to create virtual physical disks on the fly). In case you didn't know, these are some major features that enterprise-ready VM software needs to have.

      As far as *enterprise* features are concerned, in comparison with VMWare, UML and Xen are *currently* a joke.
      Xen could pick up next year, but it's got a lot of catching up to do.
      Microsoft will do quite well once they start supporting Linux (next year, I think).

    4. Re:Too little too late by bheading · · Score: 1

      You missed the first train so don't beat the dead horse now.

      That dead horse is presently earning EMC $91 million. I guess that's the sort of money you "serious computer scientists" (although how misinterpreting an article in front of the geek community on Slashdot is supposed to be "serious" I'll never know) wouldn't bother getting out of bed for.

    5. Re:Too little too late by DanteLysin · · Score: 1
      Microsoft will do quite well once they start supporting Linux (next year, I think).

      I know it's not supported, but Linux does run on Microsoft's Virtual Server platform. I like the features VMWare offers, but Microsoft VS did the job and came in at a lower price.

    6. Re:Too little too late by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      The only thing Xen is missing is Windows support (which will come with Intel VT extension). It supports heterogeneous operating system mixtures and can migrate a virtual machine between nodes in a cluster with under 10ms of downtime - enough that the server can be hosting a Q3 game and the players not notice (yes, they have tried this). Sounds pretty enterprise-ready to me. Oh yes, it performs significantly better than VMware as well.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  10. Just speculation here.... by rwven · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Can you imagine if someday they release the full sourcecode? that would be pretty slick...

    I honestly think if MS released an emulator like Mac did with their OS that would work with *NIX and OSX, they would cement themselves for a long time. No one would have a reason to leave if they got the performance good enough on the thing.

    But this is MS here, they'd never do that unfortunatley.

    1. Re:Just speculation here.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      The source code will never be fully released, at least not while they are still making money.

      Microsoft does have Virutal PC and Virtual Server (continuations of Connectix's Virtual PC), but they only "emulate" the x86 architecture. I don't know if Microsoft has made any changes to hinder performance, but Connectix Virtual PC ran *NIX just fine. As for emulating OSX, that is a tough nut to crack. The architectures are very different and the best (publically released) emulator, PearPC, runs OSX at about 1/100th native speed. There are talks and rumors about PPC/Mac emulator projects out there, but there is no evidence to suggest that they exist at all. Maybe there is not a big enough market for someone to spend the time and money to make a good PPC/Mac emulator. Until the market is there (in the eyes of the developers), we will just have to sit and wait while PearPC boots up OSX over the next few days.

    2. Re:Just speculation here.... by SPY_jmr1 · · Score: 1

      While PearPC is slow, the nightlies I tried last winter with altivec support, plus JIT features, bumped the speed into the "useable, if slugish" range.

      They don't emulate anything they don't have to, disk IO, etc, are all on par with other emulators. Maybe not as fast as a Vmware type, but certainly up to a QEMU.

      I think a copy of Panther took about 2 hours to install, and about a 10 minute bootup. Those probably would go faster if the box I was testing on had more ram in it, however.

      Just a personal report, for what it's worth.

      PS: The box was an XP Pro, 3.0 Ghz P4, with 512 of Ram. Having worked with macs since then, I would guess that the PearPC was probably on par with about a 200 Mhz PPC computer.

  11. Thumbs up for usefulness! by losman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've outfitted my entire team with VMware Workstation. Our company has a hardline in that tech support will only support the W2K and WXP images that they install. The problem is that my entire infrastructure of servers is primarily Linux/AIX.

    VMware allows us to have best of both worlds where we run SuSE 9.2 inside VMware and we basically spend 80% of our time in there. We roll and support our own images but the gains outway the cost/time to do that.

    I've been using VMware for about 3 years now and I second the comment! This is one of the most useful tools we have at our disposal. The only other tool that we rely upon and would sadly miss is TextPad. :)

    --
    Q: I am short, useless and provide no value. What am I? A: a sig
    1. Re:Thumbs up for usefulness! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It pleases me to hear of VMware success stories. I tried to get our test lab to move to VMWare from Ghost. Software testers could bring up a VM, set everything up they way the like it, save a snapshot, and test. Then, instead of waiting 10 minutes for Ghost to reimage, they hit Revert and are back to a clean state in seconds. Software testing nirvana, right? Wrong.

      Worst. Failure. Evar. Everybody hated it. The #1 complaint was that it was slow -- software took 45 seconds to install in VMware instead of 30 seconds on hardware. They were happy to sit and twiddle their thumbs for 10 minutes while Ghost re-imaged, but 15 seconds of additional install time was clearly unacceptable. They complained to management and complained to management until management threw up their hands and killed the project.

      Not that I'm bitter about it or anything.

  12. Virtualization by gtrubetskoy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think that VMWare is finding itself in potential trouble because it is not going to be easy to sustain their financial success with the Open Source projects such as QEMU and Xen gaining ground.

    I personally think that hypervisors are overhyped (pun fun!), and that the most practical and useful form of "virtualization" is actually separation as is achieved by Solaris Zones, FreeBSD jails and (the most advanced of them all IMO) Linux Vservers. A pretty good article on it here.

    Separtion carries nearly zero overhead, simplifies administration because there is one kernel and one filesystem. It allows for simple "entry" into a virtual server from the main server, and there are other subtle advantages that I can't think of right now probably....

    1. Re:Virtualization by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 1

      I personally think that hypervisors are overhyped (pun fun!), and that the most practical and useful form of "virtualization" is actually separation...

      For the most part I agree and VMWare's focus on that market is going to get them in trouble down the road. Their implementation, however, allows for virtual networks and guest OS's, both of which are lucrative markets where they have little competition. Separation is great for logically dividing and protecting an OS homogenous system, but I'm much more interested in running secondary OS's for testing, application compatibility, and honey pots. I wish there was some more competition and advancement for their workstation offerings.

    2. Re:Virtualization by defile · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I personally think that hypervisors are overhyped (pun fun!), and that the most practical and useful form of "virtualization" is actually separation as is achieved by Solaris Zones, FreeBSD jails and (the most advanced of them all IMO) Linux Vservers.

      Someone who worked at VMWare told me that their BIG MONEY comes from virtualization. System runs on computer A. Computer A needs to be moved down the hall. VMWare's server solution (allegedly) lets you move the System to computer B , in real time, with "no downtime", turn off computer A, move down the hall, then repeat the same operation but in reverse to get it back on computer A.

      Sounds expensive.

    3. Re:Virtualization by ktulu1115 · · Score: 1

      You're right, seperation does carry very little overhead compared to other methods of virtualization, however you still have the host OS kernel to deal with and interface through.

      I believe the most efficient method would be to have the host OS run an exokernel, which is being researched at MIT. Basically, an exokernel allows processes to have complete control of the system, allowing them to finely tune their resource usage (among other things) to maximize performance. For example, a database server or file server could customize the file-caching parameters and memory usage for optimal usage.

      Giving a virtualization process this kind of control would greatly improve things, and I think eventually if part of this virtualization back-end is placed into the kernel, we could achieve OS-level abstraction - one of the holy grails of modern CS.

      --
      # fuser -v /dev/attention | grep work
      #
    4. Re:Virtualization by Eivind+Eklund · · Score: 1

      I personally think that hypervisors are overhyped (pun fun!), and that the most practical and useful form of "virtualization" is actually separation as is achieved by Solaris Zones, FreeBSD jails and (the most advanced of them all IMO) Linux Vservers.

      What's the extra capabilities of Linux Vservers compared to FreeBSD jails? I couldn't find anything by a quick persual of the vserver Wiki, though that may just be my reading skills acting up as usual ;)

      Eivind.
      --
      Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
    5. Re:Virtualization by 0xABADC0DA · · Score: 1

      Typically the CPU performance penalty from running vmware 4 is about 5%. With vmware 5 it seems to be even less. If you look at the performance comparison on Xen's site you'll see essentially no difference on CPU time. The vmware they tested had problems with network and file IO, but that's two major versions ago (because of draconian vmware license against publishing benchmarks). Now vmware machines run in kernel mode (at least on linux) and have much faster IO and network, comparable to native and xen.

      And with vmware 5 you can make clones of the machines that are basically live diff's. So you can test 100 different variations of different patch levels and whatnot and use 100 mb of space instead of 100 gb. I mean sure there are reasons to use Xen over vmware, but vmware is still an awesome software. It's like photoshop, where if you have a need for what it does it's basically the only choice and well worth the high price.

      So while separation seems like the 'correct' choice, it doesn't buy you much in the end and adds lots of complexity to the OS... vmware is complex but it is basically a black box. It's like the difference between O(os*jails) vs O(os+vmware).

      Even with the native machine code plug-in, QEMU runs code something like 1/5th the speed of normal. In short it does not compete at all. I suppose qemu and bochs would be pretty nice for capturing audio from those DRM stores though =P

    6. Re:Virtualization by gtrubetskoy · · Score: 1

      What's the extra capabilities of Linux Vservers compared to FreeBSD jails? I couldn't find anything by a quick persual of the vserver Wiki, though that may just be my reading skills acting up as usual

      Existence of the "spectator" context, the ability to limit diskspace, CPU token bucket scheduler, use of filesystem namespaces, system resource limits, full SysV IPC virtualization (FreeBSD may have that by now, not sure) - just to name a few...

    7. Re:Virtualization by gtrubetskoy · · Score: 1

      Typically the CPU performance penalty from running vmware 4 is about 5%.

      I don't believe it for a second. While this statement may be facutally true, in real life where disk and network IO matter more than percentage CPU overhead, this statement is mightily misleading.

      it's like the difference between O(os*jails) vs O(os+vmware).

      Well - with separation (i.e. jails) the one system kernel will optimize (cache inodes, share code memory pages, etc) across ALL contexts (or jails). This is something VMWare/Xen/etc simply cannot do by design because a guest kernel cannot have access to the host's cache.

      And with vmware 5 you can make clones of the machines that are basically live diff's.

      I think QEMU and Bochs do this just as well.

    8. Re:Virtualization by Microlith · · Score: 1

      I think that VMWare is finding itself in potential trouble because it is not going to be easy to sustain their financial success with the Open Source projects such as QEMU and Xen gaining ground.
      So long as QEMU and Xen are only available on Linux, VMWare's not in any trouble at all.

      It's available on Windows and Linux, and could very well be available on Apple machines once x86 PowerMacs and the like start showing up.

    9. Re:Virtualization by timeOday · · Score: 1
      Ha, I use VMWare all the time and I see LOTS Of room for performance improvement. The big problem: VMWare seems to run mostly in kernel mode (as you stated), which defeats the Linux scheduler! Thus VMWare is a hog that doesn't play nice with processes on the host OS. I now resort to launching VMWare from a console so I can Ctrl-Z (suspend) it while I'm not actively doing something in Windows. Besides, it seems to me all I/O on the virtual machine is slow.

      Don't get me wrong, VMWare is a good product and I see no current competition for running Windows in any reasonable way. But to imply only a 5% performance penalty across the board is just wrong. IME, graphics are several hundred percent slower than native, not 5%.

    10. Re:Virtualization by Eivind+Eklund · · Score: 1
      Is the spectator context more convenient to work with than the FreeBSD method ("host" sees all processes, while the jails only see their own)? Immediately, it sounds less convenient - for instance, it makes just throwing in a jail() call for a single process to throw away privileges *hide* the process from "normal use". I've not lived with vservers, though - is it convenient in practice?

      FreeBSD doesn't have SysV IPC virtualization (unless our architecture docs are out of date - I didn't check the most recent code.)

      Being able to set up the various forms of limits sounds useful - it's something I've occasionally missed in FreeBSD.

      As for filesystem namespaces: Isn't that just union mounts over an image? We've had union mounts for ever, and the union filesystem should work now, as far as I know.

      Eivind.

      --
      Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
    11. Re:Virtualization by gtrubetskoy · · Score: 1
      Is the spectator context more convenient to work with than the FreeBSD method ("host" sees all processes, while the jails only see their own)? Immediately, it sounds less convenient - for instance, it makes just throwing in a jail() call for a single process to throw away privileges *hide* the process from "normal use". I've not lived with vservers, though - is it convenient in practice?

      It's definitely more convenient. Have you ever ran something like "killall -HUP named" on FreeBSD machine with jails and restarted all the jailed named's inadvertently? And if you want to see eveything like in FreeBSD - just switch to context 1.

      As for filesystem namespaces: Isn't that just union mounts over an image? We've had union mounts for ever, and the union filesystem should work now, as far as I know.

      I think it's a little different. Unionfs is something that actually would be nice to have in Linux. The namespaces are for mount lists, this means that the mount command in a context only shows its own mounts, not everything.

    12. Re:Virtualization by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm not sure if it does the same thing, but there is a UnionFS for linux (not in the vanilla kernel maybe)

    13. Re:Virtualization by Eivind+Eklund · · Score: 1
      Restricting mountpoint information sounds useful and should be fairly easy to implement. I should probably fix that.

      As for spectator context: I cannot remember ever having had a problem with jails and killall -HUP or similar. This might be because I hardly ever use killall, instead using ndc, apachectl, and friends. If there's no control program, I usually look up the PID by ps and grep, unless I really want to kill everything of something - and usually I do that something like

      ps wwaux | grep '/bin/httpd' | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill
      instead of using killall. It's an old habit - find out what I kill before I do it. The clumsy grep | awk comes from reviewing the list before running the kill.

      Given this, I think I prefer the way FreeBSD handle this. I think implementing a spectator context should be easy, though, so maybe a kernel tunable to make the "real" server see only the processes started there might be useful.

      Thank you for the answers, BTW :)

      Eivind.

      --
      Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
    14. Re:Virtualization by Bill+the+Cat · · Score: 1

      VMware expensive? Not really.

      We recently implemented vmware ESX into our production environment, purchasing 4 physical servers, ESX licenses, vmotion licenses, and a virtual center license. After connecting everything to the SAN, we can move a running VM to another physical node without any downtime. Total cost of the whole shebang was around 24 physical servers, which bought us at least 50 physical servers worth of capacity, given what we currently use the vm's for. A pretty good deal, especially when you throw in vmotion, really fine grained control over resource utilization, not having to cable, power, and network those 50 virtual machines, and a number of other nice features that vmware gets you.

    15. Re:Virtualization by gothfox · · Score: 1

      Xen does it already. And with on-chip virtualization support coming from AMD and Intel, VMware could find itself in a very awkward position.

      Anyway, I don't see the issue. So VMware opens code to its partners, which is basically the same as Microsoft's shared source initiative. O-oh, I'm overwhelmed with excitement.

    16. Re:Virtualization by kscguru · · Score: 1
      I don't believe it for a second. While this statement may be facutally true, in real life where disk and network IO matter more than percentage CPU overhead, this statement is mightily misleading.

      The point is that CPU overhead is irrelevant. And everyone doing this is learning (quickly) to paravirtualize their disk and network activity. VMware Workstation doesn't have either, but the server models are more advanced and do. Actually, properly virtualized I/O subsystems are much faster than hardware - no limitations of real Ethernet, so transmitting 10MB of info can be done with a few page table tweaks instead of across a wire.

      Well - with separation (i.e. jails) the one system kernel will optimize (cache inodes, share code memory pages, etc) across ALL contexts (or jails). This is something VMWare/Xen/etc simply cannot do by design because a guest kernel cannot have access to the host's cache.

      cache inodes: irrelevant, if you're running different OSes then you're on different filesystems.

      share code memory pages : VMware started doing this three or four years ago. They got a Best Paper out of it ... 2002 OSDI I think? The biggest gain is sharing zeroed-pages - those can even be shared cross-OS.

      The fundamental problem of separation (jails / zones) is the COMPLEXITY it adds to the operating system. It's hard to get right - really hard. I'll bet you good money there are bugs in all the existing separation code out there. With virtualization, you just have to get the virtualizing layer correct; with separation, the existing OS has to be correct, PLUS the new code ... yeah right.

      And with vmware 5 you can make clones of the machines that are basically live diff's.

      I think QEMU and Bochs do this just as well.

      I don't know about Qemu (I doubt it). Bochs didn't as of a year and a half ago. Somebody might have added it to Bochs since then (and the somebody, he works for VMware...). Anyway, making clones is easy, just copy-on-write. Keeping clones in a space-efficient manner is trickier, and VMware refused to release the multiple-checkpoint implementation until it was efficient.

      --

      A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire

    17. Re:Virtualization by kscguru · · Score: 1
      Actually, it's some asshole LINUX developer to blame for the unresponsiveness... some genuius decided X servers should run with a high priority. Great for responsiveness on native hardware, but kills anyone on the host because now a guest uses 100% cpu just idling.

      Re: graphics, no one has figured out a good way to accelerate the graphics interface yet. But the money in virtualization now is in SERVER virtualization, where gfx don't matter one bit.

      --

      A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire

    18. Re:Virtualization by MullerMn · · Score: 1

      Xen supports live migration already. Sounds free. ;)

    19. Re:Virtualization by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 1
      This might be because I hardly ever use killall

      I've started using pgrep and pkill which are fairly new to the base system. The versions in 6.0 have a "-j" flag to specify the jail ID to restrict the action to.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    20. Re:Virtualization by gtrubetskoy · · Score: 1
      The fundamental problem of separation (jails / zones) is the COMPLEXITY it adds to the operating system. It's hard to get right - really hard. I'll bet you good money there are bugs in all the existing separation code out there. With virtualization, you just have to get the virtualizing layer correct; with separation, the existing OS has to be correct, PLUS the new code ... yeah right.

      This is very true, separation is the most complex solution of them all, even though most people think otherwise - VMWare and Xen seem like magic, but what they do is actually not that complex compared to the fundamental changes that come about when you introduce contexts.

      Having said that - the separation technology is maturing rapidly, it's in Solaris and FreeBSD, and some day hopefully VServers will make it into themainline kernel.

      Anyway - separation vs hypervisor is a bit of a pointless debate, both have merits. If you need running different OS's (very common on desktop, especially for developers), then virtualization is the way to go, if you're doing Virtual Private Servers and want streamlined administration and minimal overhead - separation is the way to go IMO.

  13. They have always used/promoted OSS by csoto · · Score: 2, Informative

    VMware ESX is Linux, after all. They post their GPL'ed parts, and they provide kits that use OSS to extend scripting and management capabilities. They're pretty OSS friendly.

    Wow, 93% growth in their VMWare subsidiary! We just bought two servers, and will probably grow the "farm" to four within the next two years. We like what ESX has to offer, in terms of availability and flexibility.

    --
    There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
    1. Re:They have always used/promoted OSS by LurkerXXX · · Score: 1

      They are only Linux friendly. VMWare won't run with FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD as the host system. And only FreeBSD is supported as a guest system.

  14. RE: Snapshots by losman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Forgot about that, yes the SnapShot and Clones rock! We have to have two different configurations of our image for one to operate in the office and the other over a VPN. I just started playing with SnapShot and Clones and it worked like a charm! Definitely the features rank up there with Sliced Bread!

    --
    Q: I am short, useless and provide no value. What am I? A: a sig
  15. An API? by jhoger · · Score: 1

    Huh? An API is not source code. Nothing to see there...

    VmWare is going to continue in the proprietary vein. The F/OSS community has several projects going for it though: QEMU, Bochs, CoLinux, Xen and some others.

    VmWare Workstation is a solid product. But I think VmWare/EMC is probably in trouble as these other projects become more mature, especially Xen since it will take advantage of hardware support for virtualization.

    They are all fairly usable now, and it doesn't seem that pushing them over the hump is going to take moving heaven and earth.

    -- John.

    1. Re:An API? by guaigean · · Score: 1

      Just because something is proprietary doesn't make it inherently evil. It's when that proprietary info is abused against competitors. VMWare is opening up at least a portion, and maybe more will follow. F/OSS isn't always the best model for companies. Would you expect a game company to produce entirely F/OSS? Companies still have to make a profit in order to continue production. Don't get me wrong, I'm a HUGE F/OSS fan, and I appreciate the efforts of HP/IBM in sponsoring such efforts, but it doesn't mean I expect everyone to give away all the work they put into something.

      --
      Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
    2. Re:An API? by TopSpin · · Score: 1

      VmWare is going to continue in the proprietary vein. The F/OSS community has several projects going for it though: QEMU, Bochs, CoLinux, Xen and some others.

      I'm really happy with CoLinux. I just take it for granted that I can run Linux under Windows with native performance. At the moment I'm using it to run MySQL, Squid, Apache, Ruby and Samba. It's much better than Cygwin or SFU. Eventually there will be a framebuffer driver for CoLinux and it will be near perfect. For me, however, the Linux stuff I need does not require an X server.

      --
      Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
    3. Re:An API? by Erwos · · Score: 1

      "But I think VmWare/EMC is probably in trouble as these other projects become more mature, especially Xen since it will take advantage of hardware support for virtualization."

      I love how people assume that VMWare is just going to sit still and die. I read an article somewhere (Anandtech or Tom's Hardware, I think) that had _pictures_ of VMWare running Windows using hardware virtualization (I vaguely recall that it was VT). They're not worried because they HAVE THE CAPABILITY.

      Saying Xen is going to kill VMWare is laughably naive. Xen is nowhere near that point, and is going to have to run _much_ faster to win that particular race. And I say this as someone who's specifically waiting for dual core Athlons with Pacifica to come out before upgrading, just so I can run Xen with them.

      Stand still and die is how stupid companies bite the dust. VMWare is obviously not stupid.

      -Erwos

      --
      Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
    4. Re:An API? by jhoger · · Score: 1

      I made no assumption that VmWare is going to "sit still"... my point is the most important parts of the functionality they support already exists in the free equivalents. The free equivalents are slower today, and they don't have the hot-swap stuff but they will when they start to leverage the hardware support.

      What chance does a competitor to GCC have on a Linux based OS? None... C compilation is basically a solved problem. My point is that the same thing is happening to virtual machine software. It was a niche market to begin with, and it's coming to an end, that simple.

      This is the kind of system component that F/OSS projects can quite effectively commoditize (or snuff out depending on your point of view). It's a purely technical thing, no UI of importance, and for the most part you can drive development with bug reports and patches. I.e. once the infrastructure is in place, improvements can be made completely incrementally.

      Perhaps you're right that a stupid company dies by standing still. But you have to admit that sometimes "not standing still" means shutting down the company/division or exiting a market.

      -- John.

    5. Re:An API? by Erwos · · Score: 1

      "My point is that the same thing is happening to virtual machine software. It was a niche market to begin with, and it's coming to an end, that simple."

      VMWare's product is not just what Xen is doing. I suggest you read up on their server products, which, as I understand it, is where the real money is.

      It _might_ kill the desktop product. Might, but only if the graphical tools for Xen progress quite a bit further than they already have.

      -Erwos

      --
      Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
    6. Re:An API? by Luke-Jr · · Score: 1

      Denying people their natural rights to modify and share information/software does make the software evil. You can make money without resorting to telling others what to do.

      --
      Luke-Jr
    7. Re:An API? by kscguru · · Score: 1
      What chance does a competitor to GCC have on a Linux based OS? None... C compilation is basically a solved problem.

      Tell that to all the people dropping hundreds of dollars for a GOOD optimizing complier (icc is $399 commercial, free non-commercial).

      My point is not to be an ad. My point is that free stuff is worth what you pay for it, and when you need quality, you get out the checkbook and pay someone. VMware had most of Xen's features four years ago, and most of the difference are things VMware has invented since then. We're in for some fun times, because BOTH VMware and Xen are going to be pushing things forward, and WE benefit.

      --

      A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire

    8. Re:An API? by jhoger · · Score: 1

      "Free stuff is worth what you pay for it" is absolute nonsense. Please, pick up an economics text... a good is worth the maximum amount you would be WILLING TO PAY for it. I use Openoffice.org, Debian Linux, Vim, Firefox, gcc, many libraries etc. on a daily basis. I paid nothing to acquire them other than the bandwidth to download them, and the time to install them (apt-get install mozilla-firefox, wait 30 seconds). Your statement implies that they therefore have no value beyond perhaps the cost of getting them set up. Right.

      What's the real value of open source alternatives... lets see there's the utility of the programs themselves, the value of having the source code that I can alter myself or pay someone else to alter, that value of having a community that is motivated for various reasons to give free or cheap support, and when necessary paid support. Often you get to talk directly to the developer of the software themselves. What's all that worth?

      Xen is catching up, with a big assist from the hardware vendors. Add to that the fact that there isn't much more to be added to virtual machine emulators, and VmWare has to be worried over some specific timeframe... my guess, 2 to 3 years and this product will be a commodity with close to $0 price tag.

      I guess there's always the possibility that they could leverage some of their patents against their open source competitors. But that's about the only thing they have in their arsenal.

    9. Re:An API? by kscguru · · Score: 1
      Your statement implies that they therefore have no value beyond perhaps the cost of getting them set up.

      Precisely - open source products have a (generally) high setup cost. Closed source products are all over the place, but even Windows has a lower setup cost than most open-source. (Hang on... I'll explain why...)

      Your "apt-get install mozilla-firefox" example is convenient - and wrong. You've ignored two costs that are EXTREMELY high: learning to use apt-get and figuring out the name mozilla-firefox. (Cheeky, yes, but bear with me). apt-get is a complex and powerful tool that requires you to set up the right repositories and manually handle dependency conflicts (libc issues...). Simply issuing "install" works if the system is in perfect working order ... it takes SERIOUS time-cost to get it there, or a uselessly uncustomized stock install. The name mozilla-firefox... gee, I thought the program was named firefox! Right now, go to google, start searching for how to install firefox on linux ... first hit I get says download a tarball and run ./firefox_installer. Certainly no apt-get instructions there... and wait, this differs from your instructions, who's right? (reaches for PANIC button). Multiple conflicting install paths, and firefox is one of the easiest Linux installs I've ever done (to be fair, it took me only two days. Because even though firefox was compatable, the installer had a libc conflict with my base install's libsafe. You expect a novice to figure that out?). Compare to MS Windows: I stick in the install CD, and click pretty obvious buttons.

      Alright, I'm being facetious ... but I do have a point. To someone who already knows what they need, open source is fine. To someone who doesn't know, who doesn't have mastery of every configuration option and tool they need ... paying extra for closed source (and the polish that goes along with it) is far more economical.

      What's the real value of open source alternatives... lets see there's the utility of the programs themselves, the value of having the source code that I can alter myself or pay someone else to alter, that value of having a community that is motivated for various reasons to give free or cheap support, and when necessary paid support. Often you get to talk directly to the developer of the software themselves. What's all that worth?

      What's it worth to you? Quite a bit, I take it. To me, who doesn't need custom compilers or custom web browsers and who isn't interested in manually updating and patching the codebase, and who doesn't have the background in this codebase to follow free community-offered help NOR THE TIME TO LEARN THAT BACKGROUND, it has zero value.

      And I'm rather offended at open source zealots who insist their code has value to me when I look at the time I'd have to invest to learn it and see negative value.

      I don't complain about the existence of free, open-source products - heck, I use many of them and appreciate them! But I am deeply offended at this "open source is the one true way" and "you're either with us or against us" attitude that tells me the work I do is meaningless. Meaningless to you, maybe, but I'm not trying to sell to you. I'm trying to sell to people who appreciate the value of what I do.

      (Sorry, you pushed a hot-button here)

      --

      A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire

    10. Re:An API? by jhoger · · Score: 1

      apt-cache search firefox

      was all it took for me to figure out which package to install. Or during a desktop install it is there by default as I believe it is in Debian and Ubuntu.

      Yes at some point I had to learn how to use apt. At some point windows users have to learn to find things in the control panel, and what "my computer" is, and what a virus scanner is, and to find the setup.exe, not to open email attachments, etc.

      The learning curve always costs. Whether it is a good tradeoff to learn something new is on a case by case basis. In some cases, you can hire someone else who already knows how to do the work.

      Installing Debian Linux (one time hit) and learning to use apt or synaptic makes a library of 30,000 programs an apt-get away. That's a very high return on your investment. In Windows you pop in a CD and look for the setup.exe. A bit less to do, but hey, you can pay me $75 an hour to come to your house and install the occasional app via apt-get and you'll probably pay less than if you bought payware.

      As to whether having code is valuable... having the code to Windows has a value. Every time I try to figure out why some bloody control isn't working, and have to work around a bug instead of fixing it, or at least scoping out the code to see exactly what I'm up against I incur more cost than if I had the code.

      So I would say you're just wrong there... having the code has an inherent value, just like having a support contract for software has an inherent value, or the right to return a product to the store has an inherent value (that you pay for) even if you never use it.

      As to saying "open source is the one true way" or "you're either with us or agin us" is not what I said. Proprietary software has advantages and open source has advantages. Probably the biggest difference between the two in this regard is that often in open source developers are working on their free time so they don't pick the unpleasent squishy messy UI polish tasks that a proprietary software maker just pays to get done. And for open source the community of early adopters does the QA. Well, maybe we're the same on that score...

      No one said your work was meaningless (why would I, I don't know what you do). I write some proprietary software too. It's often a perfectly rational thing to do.

      In this case though, to a systems programmer anyway, virtualization software is all fun, so it's being worked on and is going to be worked on, and it will lay waste to the products in this market. That's life in the big city.

      -- John.

  16. PCs becoming more like Mainframes? by starseeker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't the better machines from the old mainframe days virtualize themselves? IIRC someone ported Linux to one of the virtual machines and was able to run a crazy number of instances on one set of hardware.

    I know this sounds (is?) crazy, but why not open up the architecture of the old mainframes, and base the next generation of PC hardware on those ideas? CPU and memory are cheap now, but those suckers were designed to be robust back when you couldn't solve all problems by making large clusters of faulty machines - they had to work, period. Surely modern PCs could match much of the power of an old mainframe machine, properly designed, and the whole modern desktop OS and apps could just be run on a virtual instance from a PC. This would allow, say, Windows and Linux to coexist, run at the same time, have no issues crop up that software like VMware has to work around, and allow for all sorts of interesting debugging possibilities (how about booting up another VM to debug a wiped out desktop OS, just by pressing a button on the keyboard?)

    IIRC x86 has some real issues with virtualization, but if what I have heard is true and x86 is now mostly a layer put on top of more advanced cores in most CPUs perhaps the problem has already been (largely) addressed. Does this makes sense to anyone else - would it be good to have "desktop mainframes"?

    --
    "I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
    1. Re:PCs becoming more like Mainframes? by jcr · · Score: 1

      Correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't the better machines from the old mainframe days virtualize themselves?

      Well, IBM had an OS product called "VM", and it could even host itself. There wasn't anything particularly special about the hardware to allow this, beyond having user and supervisor modes.

      Amdahl first ran UNIX under VM sometime in the mid-80's. The stories we heard a few years back about IBM running tens of thousands of instances of Linux on their latest machine at the time, were just more of the same.

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    2. Re:PCs becoming more like Mainframes? by DreadSpoon · · Score: 1
      know this sounds (is?) crazy, but why not open up the architecture of the old mainframes, and base the next generation of PC hardware on those ideas?


      Because that feature wouldn't be useful to the vast majority of consumers and would be a waste of R&D and transistor costs.

      Mainframes aren't obsolete, by the way. You can buy modern mainframe systems from IBM and others, which tout the virtualization features.
    3. Re:PCs becoming more like Mainframes? by renoX · · Score: 2, Informative

      >IIRC someone ported Linux to one of the virtual machines and was able to run a crazy number of instances on one set of hardware.

      IBM did, but noone said that this 'crazy number' of Linux VM was something usable, I think it was just a stress test.
      What is the point of running a 'crazy number' of VM if most of them must stay idle otherwise the computer melt down under the load?

      Also no need to 'open up' the architecture of mainframes, AMD and Intel are adding their own virtualisation technology to x86, they have hyped it several times already.

      Virtualisation will increase the flexibility for administrators, and allow some power usage reduction, but I'll doubt that companies will rush to dump their current hardware to have these new CPUs just because they support virtualisation..

    4. Re:PCs becoming more like Mainframes? by asuffield · · Score: 1

      I know this sounds (is?) crazy, but why not open up the architecture of the old mainframes, and base the next generation of PC hardware on those ideas?

      The simple answer is because they aren't obsolete. IBM still has a very large business building and selling those mainframes, which they have continued to develop. If you want that kind of hardware, you talk to IBM, and they will sell it to you. If you don't, you buy a PC.

      If you just want one instance of linux and one of windows on your desk, you buy two PCs. It's cheaper.

    5. Re:PCs becoming more like Mainframes? by VAXcat · · Score: 1

      Lots of places are getting into VMware so that they can do more than one thing on a single server...if Windows had decent memory management and a decent scheduler, you wouldn't have to virtualize an entire other instance of the OS in order to do more than one thing...you could just run some other tasks on the OS...

      --
      There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
    6. Re:PCs becoming more like Mainframes? by tweek · · Score: 1

      They've actually done a small bit of this in the following sense. They've ported those technologies across all the platforms.

      I remember when we bought our x445s a few years back. They told us we could run a stripped down version of vmware and create LPARs on top of that if we wanted.

      Of course now we've moved to p5 land so we're doing the LPARs there but same concept.

      --
      "Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
  17. No OS/X? No thanks. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why would anyone want to bet their critical infrastructure on a non-Apple OS? Talk about outlandish idiocy.

  18. They're thinking more long-term, which is smart by jerkychew · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "But from the looks of last quarter's financial reports, VMware doesn't need much help getting people on board."

    It's got nothing to do with revenue, it's about market share. Virtual machines are going to be huge in the coming years, especially in the webhosting market. Pretty soon, leasing a "dedicated server" will be simply leasing a dedicated "instance" of a server, for lack of a better word.

    EMC wants to keep their lion's share of the market, especially with products like MS' Virtual Server 2005 and SWSoft's Virtuozzo entering the fray.

    I did some contracting work for Big Blue a few months ago, and their deployment teams LOVE VMWare. They used it for all kinds of crazy stuff, and it worked amazingly well. I hadn't used VMWare since a very early beta back in the 90's, and was impressed at how well it has come along since then.

    EMC is just protecting its market share now as best it can, before others start chipping into it.

    1. Re:They're thinking more long-term, which is smart by ZorbaTHut · · Score: 1

      "Pretty soon"?

      I have a virtual private server. It's awesome. $20/month, and it's up 24/7 on a fucking amazing connection (I've clocked 6megabyte/second downstream), and I've got 30gb of bandwidth per month. I tend to use maybe 100mb.

      I have three other friends with VPSes. One of them has multiple special-purpose VPSes.

      I don't know anyone with a real dedicated non-virtual server.

      Your "pretty soon" is now :)

      --
      Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
    2. Re:They're thinking more long-term, which is smart by jerkychew · · Score: 1

      Who's the host? Guess I'm a step behind the times. :-)

    3. Re:They're thinking more long-term, which is smart by ZorbaTHut · · Score: 1

      I personally use http://www.rimuhosting.com/ - they've worked quite well for me. Good prices, good servers. :)

      --
      Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
    4. Re:They're thinking more long-term, which is smart by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 1

      Pretty soon, leasing a "dedicated server" will be simply leasing a dedicated "instance" of a server, for lack of a better word.
      Though not nearly the isolation of a true VM, BSD jails have been usable for this for quite some time, I remember seeing this for hosting companies back when FreeBSD 4.2 came out.

    5. Re:They're thinking more long-term, which is smart by DanteLysin · · Score: 1
      I did some contracting work for Big Blue a few months ago, and their deployment teams LOVE VMWare. They used it for all kinds of crazy stuff, and it worked amazingly well. I hadn't used VMWare since a very early beta back in the 90's, and was impressed at how well it has come along since then.

      They also use Microsoft Virtual Server. It's nice when you can pass entire test environments to your partners. No more trying to secure VPN lines or moving the environment to a DMZ. I got all the environments I need from a partner, literally overnight. For Development/QA/Support shops, virtualization is a blessing.

    6. Re:They're thinking more long-term, which is smart by Saeger · · Score: 1
      I noticed rimuhosting has switched to Xen VPSs. Last I looked they were still using Usermode Linux and the competition was better priced.

      I'll probably be switching to rimuhosting asap even though they offer slightly less diskspace and fewer OS options. Unixshell.com - my current xen host - has been very unreliable, and just this week I've gotten no reply about a triple-overbilling error.

      --
      Power to the Peaceful
  19. QEMU by Zarhan · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you don't want to pay for VMWare, I would suggest trying out QEMU.

    Ever since the "QEMU accelerator" module has been released (version 0.70), it has worked as a virtualizer as well as emulator, so you can get almost VMWare-like performance (that is, if you just want to run Windows under Linux or vice versa). QEMU itself is licensed under LGPL, the accelerator module is free as in beer (and there's another, open-source accelerator project in the works, though I'm not sure what the situation is today)

  20. Re: Snapshots by alaeth · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Man, I forgot about cloning... Get a base image perfected with all your tools installed, Clone it as a linked clone. voila, infinite copies, all of which can run at the same time. Co-worker needs a copy of your image? No problemo, make a full clone and NewSID it (sysinternals.com)

    --
    Sig goes here.
  21. QEMU has no USB support by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    someone get patchin'

    1. Re:QEMU has no USB support by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There probably will be in next release, if you're impatient just use the patch in

      http://gnome.dnsalias.net/patches/

  22. Xen & Pacifica to put a hurt on VMWARE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    AMD will release Pacifica Q1'06 which provides OS virtualization in hardware.

    This will allow Xen to transparently virtualize linux, windows, macosx, etc.

    What you are seeing is VMWARE desparately trying to entrench themselves in the virtualization market before Xen & Pacifica (and whatever Intel's processor is) makes their product technologically non interesting.

    From what I understand they offer nice add tools, and that's pretty much the only way they can actually have any sort of future in the virtualization market.

    1. Re:Xen & Pacifica to put a hurt on VMWARE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Intel's is called Vanderpool. I think AMD named theirs to just make fun of Intel (Pacifica does more than Vanderpool).

      OT: Is it just me or are the script confirmation things getting harder to read? I really should find my password since my account had higher enough Karma that I didn't have to do those stupid things...

    2. Re:Xen & Pacifica to put a hurt on VMWARE by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 1

      FYI, Intel have already donated code to Xen to support their equivalent ("Vanderpool"), which is due for public release H2 2005. They've also given Cambridge some machines to developer / test on. IBM have also helped out with this effort. Intel in fact contributed the code before even releasing the specs to VT (!).

      AMD will also be donating code to Xen - they're discussing right now how best to integrate their code.

      VMware's big strength is probably the tools. They'll certainly support VT and Pacifica (I imagine Intel and AMD has teams working with them and with MS). They'll also be introducing a Xen-style paravirtualisation API for VMware-aware guests to achieve better performance - VMM-aware guests are always going to do better than fully virtualised guests that think they're on real hardware.

  23. Less real significance over time... by Douglas+Simmons · · Score: 3, Insightful

    With the open source term becoming the latest wall street Good Thing buzzword, the risk-reward ratio of releasing source code, more often than not in a very limited way, is an attempt on behalf of these companies to declare to public investors that the integrity of their product is strong enough to the degree that they have no compunction of releasing their secret blueprints, essentially inviting people to come hack pbrush.exe and VMware. To hackers, most of this OS releasing going on is of software that has no hacking appeal. There's just no motive to capitalizing on these OS releases.

    I, for one, am not impressed by what strike me as PR maneuvers which at best are patinas devoid of true significance worthy of a meaningful press release. Otoh, I suppose it may increase shareholder wealth, the legal purpose of a public company.

  24. They don't need to. by jcr · · Score: 2, Informative

    I see Mac OS X Server on (something like) vmware on non-Apple x86 enterprise server hardware in Apple's future.

    I don't. Apple's been very clear on their intentions, and they're not about to throw their users to the mercy of the crap hardware makers like Dell and Gateway.

    I think that the far more likely scenario is that shops that have legacy apps that have to run on MS operating systems will be able to run them under VMWare on their Intel-based Xserves.

    The benefit of this will be that as soon as a watchdog process detects that the windows instance has been damaged in any way, it's trivial to kill it and restart from a pristine image.

    This is the ultimate customer solution to MS's myriad quality issues: run the broken product in a sandbox on a working system.

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    1. Re:They don't need to. by sickofthisshit · · Score: 1

      He said specifically "enterprise server hardware."

      Not Gateway. More like IBM or HP blade servers.

    2. Re:They don't need to. by jcr · · Score: 1

      More like IBM or HP blade servers.

      I haven't seen quality hardware from either IBM or HP in at least a decade. All the profit in that business is going to MS, and the x86 machines just keep getting more and more flimsy.

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  25. coLinux by Aggrajag · · Score: 1

    In my opinion coLinux offers the best virtual Linux environment running on Windows. The speed is pretty close to native Linux and they've already started implementing a framebuffer so running X without VNC is going to be reality in the close future.

    1. Re:coLinux by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 1

      One of the really big markets for virtualisation is for server consolidation in the enterprise. In these cases, it's very important to achieve strong isolation, as in VMware, Xen, etc.

      coLinux is great for compatibility. Some guys also used it recently to get software RAID 5 working over USB disk under Windows - pretty cool :-)

  26. similarly... by Mr.+Underbridge · · Score: 1
    I'm wondering if people will use VMware to crack whatever BIOS DRM Apple uses to prevent OS X on commodity x86 hardware. It's cheaper to buy a cheap PC, throw on vmware, and install OSX than to buy an Apple. It's also probably easier to trick OS X into thinking it's running on a Mac when running it in a virtual machine.

    Of course, that's only of interest for those who want OS X more than a mac.

  27. NO NO NO...! by loudgazelle · · Score: 3, Informative

    VMWare ESX is NOT Linux...

    1. Re:NO NO NO...! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      VMware ESX is a modified RedHat 7.2 distribution. It uses LILO to boot a linux kernel (2.4 based) and performs the usual Linux startup operations (right down to Redhat-style "Starting xxx... [ OK ]" messages.

      The vmware kernel (aptly named vmkernel) is a kernel module loaded at boot time and takes control over the hardware not used by the Linux kernel (VMware calls this the service console).

      Watch the boot cycle on ESX, its all there.

      In short, ESX IS LINUX. VMware uses Open Source projects quite a bit:
        Host-only networking? Uses Samba
        VMware Remote Console? VNC with additional VMware-specific functionality
        VMware's internal DHCP server? ISC's DHCP server

      Read up on VMware or take a class before you go shooting off at the mouth.

    2. Re:NO NO NO...! by loudgazelle · · Score: 1

      way to reply as an AC.

      The vast majority of the windows servers I use at work run on top of ESX server- production and lab environments. And no, I don't work in the back-office of some podunk company with 3 servers...we're in the Fortune 20.

      I know ESX server. I've been using it every day for the last couple of years.
      I know it uses a RH bootloader. I've installed it and watched it boot countless times.
      I know it uses Samba. I use it to back up the disk files.

      In short, what's your point?

      Nowhere in my post did I say they don't use open source. You act like I was defending them when I was simply correcting the widely held belief that the ESX kernel is just a modified Linux kernel, which is flat-out wrong.

      You ought to make sure you comprehend the post before you go shooting off at the mouth.

    3. Re:NO NO NO...! by boy_afraid · · Score: 0

      Just because it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, don't mean it's a Duck.

  28. Reality check by renoX · · Score: 1

    - As said above XP doesn't work with Xen, VMWare does.
    - Xen is not yet compatible with NPTL, I think.
    This will change, of course, but this hardly makes Xen so exciting, doesn't it?

    1. Re:Reality check by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 1

      XP will need hardware support that'll be forthcoming presently... Unfortunately there's not a way round that (other than to use QEmu / Win4Lin under Xen and take the performance hit of those products).

      NPTL works under Xen x86_32 but it's better (for performance) if you don't use it. On x86_64 it's fine, doesn't matter to performance. In fully virtualised mode (with hardware support) it doesn't matter either.

      But yes, despite my biases for Xen, VMware is also an amazing piece of engineering. Both have advantages and VMware also offer advanced management products right now (XenSource will be offering similar products for Xen soon, I believe).

  29. VMware is doomed by popo · · Score: 2, Interesting


    This is a last desperate move from a company who knows its already beat.

    Why?

    AMD released its VM simulation software (a preview of its Pacifica technology) today. The new AMD Pacifica technology will allow multiple OS's to run on a single CPU as virtual machines.

    Intel -- (IMHO always pathetically playing catch up to AMD these days) -- has also promised a VM system in the coming months.

    So we've got $180 Billion Intel and $7 Billion AMD competing for the VM space, and VMware in a desperate last ditch effort to entrench themselves as the industry standard, opens up their API.

    I hate to say it, but it ain't gonna work. The heavyweights are coming.

    --
    ------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
    1. Re:VMware is doomed by supra · · Score: 1

      Not to mention MS' Virtual PC.
      I haven't used any, but MS is always willing to
      embrace...err...extend...err...innovate...ahhh let's just buy 'em out, that always works.

      --
      On a computer or under a hood.
    2. Re:VMware is doomed by birder · · Score: 1

      Is Pacifica a product or a technology that Microsoft and EMC/VMware would use? I'm still not exactly clear on this. VMware has a number of technologies that make using virtual machines very useful.

      I think a lot of people think of VMware as VMware Workstation but their ESX (and GSX to an extent) is their business bread and butter along with VirtualCenter not to mention VMotion pretty much has a patened lockdown on real time machine moving.

      It's good to see some cometition in the market but VMware has been doing this for many years and it will take some time for them to fall behind.

    3. Re:VMware is doomed by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 1
      AMD released its VM simulation software (a preview of its Pacifica technology) today. The new AMD Pacifica technology will allow multiple OS's to run on a single CPU as virtual machines.

      Intel is actually a bit ahead of AMD here - they've been shipping real hardware to developers for some time now and are intending to release to the public during H2 this year. We have had Intel VT boxes in Cambridge for Xen work for months (and Intel contributed code to allow Xen to make use of them).

      So we've got $180 Billion Intel and $7 Billion AMD

      It's important to note that Intel and AMD just want to support virtualisation in hardware but you still need a virtual machine monitor to run on it. This will be something like VMware or Xen - the hardware doesn't natively implement virtual machines, just provides assists for a VMM wishing to do so.

      Intel (and AMD, soon) have contributed code to the Xen project and I rather expect they will also have assigned teams to work with VMware and MS to help them support the technology also.

    4. Re:VMware is doomed by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 1

      Pacifica / Vanderpool provide "assists" for a VMM, rather than replacing the VMM. VMware ESX will be able to take advantage of these (eventually), as will Xen - they won't go away.

    5. Re:VMware is doomed by popo · · Score: 1


      It's important to note that Intel and AMD just want to support virtualisation in hardware but you still need a virtual machine monitor to run on it. This will be something like VMware or Xen - the hardware doesn't natively implement virtual machines, just provides assists for a VMM wishing to do so.

      AFAIK AMD and INTEL are making VM monitors. As I understand it AMD Pacifica or IntelVM will compete directly against VMware and Xen. The hardware *will* natively implement virtual machines.

      --
      ------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
    6. Re:VMware is doomed by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 1
      AFAIK AMD and INTEL are making VM monitors. As I understand it AMD Pacifica or IntelVM will compete directly against VMware and Xen. The hardware *will* natively implement virtual machines.



      Nope, although early reports seemed to indicate the contrary, the hardware definitely doesn't implement full virtual machines. It gives you the building blocks but lacks the logic to use them (also, virtual devices, etc need to be implemented separately, as do the management tools).

      Basically, Pacifica and VT extend the instruction set to close up the "holes" in the x86 architecture that make it hard to virtualise, plus they add some extensions to help with performance and flexibility. That's all however: Intel and AMD appear to be just adding value to their hardware, not competing with existing software.

      Both companies have likely developed hypervisors *internally* for testing purposes but haven't expressed any interest in trying to sell them.

  30. Separation isn't comparable by DreadSpoon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Separation is great if all you're looking to do is separate privileges. That's not what Xen or VMware are really about, though. Virtualization gives you features that Separation does not.

    A big one is being able to run two completely different OSes on a single machine at the same time.

    Another is that you can kernel development a lot easier using virtualization than if you had to develop *on* your development kernel and constantly reboot/crash/fix/etc. This also holds true for security when using virtualization as a form of privilege separation, as kernels can have security holes and bugs, too.

    A third is the ability to take snapshots of a running system and saving, transferring, and restoring that state.

    Sure, virtualization is a _little_ slower than separation, but that's the price you have to pay if you want those features.

    Emulation also brings some other advantages in addition to virtualization, at the cost of even worse performance. Once again, you can't just say that virtualization or separation are better than emulation, because that isn't really true in all cases; if you have a need to run some binaries made for one architecture on another, only emulation is going to help you.

  31. I'll bet a $20 that by IdleTime · · Score: 0

    within a few days of the release there will be numerous torrents for it. Any takers?

    --
    If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
  32. To put things in perspective... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    According to the latest 10k, VMware makes up approximately $200 million of EMC's $8 billion revenue. Point is that it is not probably not as important to EMC as some of its other products.

  33. and this is different... by supra · · Score: 1

    ...from Shared Source how? Select people can look; doesn't fit any open source license I know of.

    --
    On a computer or under a hood.
  34. Live migration (and how it works) by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Another *huge* benefit for the enterprise is the ability to Live Migrate with both Xen and VMware ESX. This allows you to move a virtual machine *whilst running* to another host system.

    Imagine evacuating all your servers from another host to other systems before taking it down for maintenance, or load balancing a "virtual server farm" over a cluster of real machines that you can easily add to and rebalance.

    Sound like magic? It's not, it's just very cunning ;-) You precopy as much state as possible, then stop the virtual machine for a *very* small copy operation of the remaining state before completing the transfer.

    Xen can migrate a running Quake 3 server with a 60ms outage (short enough that the grad students in the lab didn't notice the migration).

  35. Re:Virtualization (Xen vs VMware - technical) by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 1

    Here's my Xen-oriented take on this:

    Performance penalty for compute-intensive apps should be near zero on any virtualisation system - that's *relatively* easy. The difficult part is the kernel mode and IO stuff. VMware has to take bigger penalties than Xen for kernel-mode stuff because it must scan and rewrite the machine code before running it (for correctness and isolation). I haven't seen any numbers for this sort of workload on a recent VMware, though.

    The IO performance can be fixed (although I understand VMware only support really good IO on their more expensive products) by using virtualisation-aware drivers (same as Xen), so that should perform well.

    Things like live clones (VM forks) are underway for Xen. You can also use CoW (using LVM or similar) to share block devices copy on write between several virtual machines.

  36. .sig: M$ is unabiguous by Morosoph · · Score: 1

    MS also stands for Multiple Sclerosis. M$ resolves this ambiguity nicely.

    --
    Wikileaks, no DNS
  37. Apache on QEMU by Poromenos1 · · Score: 1

    Idea: Is there some kind of minimal linux distro with apache on it that I can load in QEMU (or another emulator that supports networking) and have a full blown webserver with FTP etc while being reasonably protected from hackers (well, at least the rest of the system will be).

    --
    Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
  38. API or source code? by dabadab · · Score: 1

    Would it be too much to ask to make the distinction between API and source code? After all, it's a technical site, or at least that's what it's supposed to be.

    --
    Real life is overrated.
  39. Virtual PC with Visual Studio 2005 by Samus · · Score: 1
    But from the looks of last quarter's financial reports, VMware doesn't need much help getting people on board.

    Whatever last quarters results were don't matter too much. Their main competitor is about to give away a free copy of Virtual PC with every upper level version of Visual Studio 2005. The Team System and the two top professional editions will all come bundled with it. That's not to say that you can't already download it with your MSDN subscription, or that it wasn't in any of the media updates though. It was there but now it's going to be bundled in a retail box as well.

    --
    In Republican America phones tap you.
    1. Re:Virtual PC with Visual Studio 2005 by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Their main competitor is about to give away a free copy of Virtual PC with every upper level version of Visual Studio 2005.

      We just tried (and failed) to virtualize four machines on a single dual-Xeon system with 3GB of RAM using VPC. After dicking around with it for a week, we switched to VMWare and had it running well in about an hour. Save for the shoddy documentation, VMWare trounced it in every way.

      I don't think I'd consider VPC a competitor to VMWare today. Next year, maybe. Right now? Not from what I can tell.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    2. Re:Virtual PC with Visual Studio 2005 by SeanLee · · Score: 1
      Whatever last quarters results were don't matter too much...

      Rats.

      Doomed engineer looking for stable new job in market not currently domintated or threatened by Micros~1.

      --
      Working hard to put food on your family.
    3. Re:Virtual PC with Visual Studio 2005 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We have over 6 virtual machines running on a dual Xeon 2.8 with 2 gig of ram. Worked fine the first time we did it.

    4. Re:Virtual PC with Visual Studio 2005 by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 1
      Using VPC? Our IT guy would've loved to have seen that. Ours seemed to run OK for a few hours, but would fall over after receiving a bunch of network connections - the whole session would freeze and require an "end task". The VMWare sessions, though, have been cranking away for several weeks without a hitch.

      BTW, this was running Win2K inside the sessions and WS2003 as the host OS, if that makes any difference.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    5. Re:Virtual PC with Visual Studio 2005 by DanteLysin · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Running Virtual PC on Windows 2003? Try the server edition on your server platform. I've been running over ~400 Virtual Servers since March without a problem.

      Windows 2003 for the host OS
      Virtualized OS's include: win98, winnt4, win2000, win2003, xp, linux.

      I did have problems getting Solaris 10 to work on both VMWare and MVS. My Solaris installer choked on the hardware detection phase.

  40. Mainframes by TimeTraveler1884 · · Score: 1
    I know this sounds (is?) crazy, but why not open up the architecture of the old mainframes, and base the next generation of PC hardware on those ideas?
    Yeah, but who wants to go back to programming with punchcards? Papercuts can be potentially fatal.

    (Yes, I am kidding)
    1. Re:Mainframes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Curiously enough, for truly long term data storage punch cards are probably the best bet. They are the highest density data which can be read by a purely mechanical system (e.g. not depending on electricity) and thus the best bet for long term readibility. CDs and DVDs talk about decades of life, for the better ones (archival quality maybe a century or two?). Clay tablets and stone have been the way we learn about older cultures. Early clay tablets survived a LONG time.

      So how about this - we make a series of "time capsules" designed to last thousands of years, and record the information we want to put on them on non-perishable metal (say, perhaps, an Al alloy or some such) punch cards. High density, high durability, and the machines to read them can be made much more easily in case a high powered tech base isn't available.

      Of course, what we would want to save is something else again... boy would that ever be political. (and a fascinating exploration of our knowledge - how do we create instructions for recreating our technological base?)

    2. Re:Mainframes by orkysoft · · Score: 1
      (say, perhaps, an Al alloy or some such)
      There are microbes that eat Aluminium. How about using gold instead?
      --

      I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
  41. ...Or Sun for that matter.. by museumpeace · · Score: 1

    A name whose absence seems even louder than Apple' is Sun Microsystems. I don't know why this story was not news when I submitted it yesterday NYTimes slant on the story was that it was a strategic move to keep Microsoft out of the game becoming a "standard" before MS had a chance to establish its own competing methods. The real deal with MS of course is that they dread VM because virtual machines reduce the importance of the OS role.

    --
    SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
  42. And what about kqemu / qvm86? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    i just saw xen for the first time and am not terribly impressed - kqemu (the kernel module extension of qemu) can already run guest operating systems 'natively', i.e. direct on the hardware, only emulating privileged instructions and without need for guest OS modifications. yes, using the already-available kqemu you can run windows xp inside linux using only virtualisation instead of emulation, network between the host and guest, etc.

    although fabrice has kept this kernel module proprietary while looking for sponsorship, another qemu developer is making fast work on qvm86, which will do the same job openly. kqemu will have a freebsd port soon, and will rapidly catch up with vmware in terms of capabilities. xen seems to be a relative dead end when you hit operating systems without free licensing terms.

    qemu is frankly the most amazing piece of software i've seen released in years, considering its origins and development team (1 person, with 3 or 4 supplementing). i wish it could attract more hands, as a new code generator could increase performance even more over the current dyngen scheme.

  43. VNC + VMware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'd like to see a VMware that has a VNC server as a display. Currently you can do this by running a normal VNC server in the guest OS, or running VMware from inside an X VNC server, but in both cases there are performance issues because there are too many levels of indirection and reprocessing going on.

    Maybe one of the VNC companies (RealVNC?) should join this partnership thing.

  44. Webcams work by triskaidekaphile · · Score: 1

    Although my Linux host would often recognize the camera and load its drivers first, so I would have to force the driver to unload. Then the windows visitor could use the webcam just fine!

    --
    @HbFyo0$k8 tH!$
  45. AMD and Intel putting pressure on VMWare by Hack+Jandy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think the largest reason VMWare is doing this is because Intel and AMD are both developing technologies that allow multiple OSes per CPU; thus eliminating the need for VMWare altogether. Google for "AMD Pacifica" and "Intel VT" and you will see.

    HJ

    1. Re:AMD and Intel putting pressure on VMWare by SeanLee · · Score: 1
      ...thus eliminating the need for VMWare altogether.

      Don't ya just hate it when you make a comment like that, and then the 1st Google hit returns a statement from AMD like "Come learn how companies like yours can optimize HP based Blade technology and AMD Opteron based ProLiant servers by building a secure, flexible, virtual infrastructure with VMware software."

      --
      Working hard to put food on your family.
    2. Re:AMD and Intel putting pressure on VMWare by Hack+Jandy · · Score: 1

      The technology is a few years off, it's still there though. I am just saying VMWare is hedging their bets.

      HJ

  46. Nothing comes close to VMware by kicha · · Score: 4, Informative

    For many VMware is just workstation product. Because that is what they get to see people discussing in the LUG. Please checkout www.vmtn.net (VMware technology network) and see the discussions on ESX,VC and ACE from the enterprise users. The feature set that you get there is mind blowing. I cant think of anything equivalent in any other product/OS currently or in the near future. VMware has many "first" to their credit that no other software provides/provided. But I would say they have been such a low profile company. They are hitting the headlines only after their EMC acquisition, which is understandable considering they are moving more into Enterprise segment. Just a partial list of features: NICteaming across different NIC make and models at the kernel level Virtual VLAN Beaconing NIC Failover PXE boot SAN Multipathing Multi vendor SAN support at the kernel level SAN path failover Hot backups of virtual machines through redo logs VMotion (move VMs from one physical host to another without the underlying OS knowing about it) Perl/COM APIs to control Virtual Machines Multiple level of snapshots with VC Cloning from the same base image in WKS By far the largest number of guest OS support. ACE -Virtual machine deployment (http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop/ace_featur es.html) The product and its features just speaks for themselves. Go and read the specs or try it for yourself. Do not compare VMware with Xen/Virtual PC or any other projects. They have just started to do things that VMware did 6 years ago. yes pacificia and vanderpool will let anyone do virtualization. So what ? If vmware could do so many things when there was no hardware support for virtualization, imagine what they could bring in when the support is built into the hardware. With them already ahead of the game by miles, I could only see that vanderpool and pacifici help them proliferate further in the server market space.

    1. Re:Nothing comes close to VMware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The real reason VMWARE is doing this it to take a pre-emptive strike against Microsoft's virtualization plans. Too bad that strike will fail and once Microsoft has their shit together with the 3rd or 4th release of their product NO ONE will buy VMWARE when you get it for free with Microsoft as an enterprise customer or MSDN partner. I said it first. Goodbye VMWARE

    2. Re:Nothing comes close to VMware by g2racer · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I've gotta agree with kicha. VMWare has a huge head-start over any of their competitors (Microsoft and Xen) especially in the enterprise space. And you gotta think that they've got plans to integrate the hardware based virtualization that AMD and Intel are promising. I use Workstation every day for my development environment and it blows my mind that it's all virtual and runs pretty close to native speeds, but it's a toy compared to the ESX that we use to deploy our portal.

  47. Open source != Free software by recoiledsnake · · Score: 1

    see subject. I would say this move is partially open source but nowhere close to free software. This is the difference that Stallman tries to drill into people heads at his talks. And yes, I attended one of his talks. :)

    --
    This space for rent.
    1. Re:Open source != Free software by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Perhaps you should read the Open Source Definition. Particularly point 1. This is not open source.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  48. conflicts of interest?!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Many of these firms (HP, IBM, etc) are invested and actively developing direct competition to VMWare products (Xen, etc), how does this agreement deal with the conflict of interest? Is there a chinese wall stipulated between the partners' product development teams? Granted that it is now accepted that firms compete in some markets and partner in others, but this seems like EMC is giving the foxes keys to the henhouse. Sounds like they're quite frightened if they're doing this in the first place though...

  49. VMware is in trouble by cahiha · · Score: 2, Informative

    VMware had done the hard work of virtualizing a processor that wasn't designed to be virtualized. But upcoming chips from Intel and AMD will support virtualization directly. While you still need some additional code (device emulation, etc.) to get a full hypervisor or virtual machine environment, that code already exists. In different words, the virtualization features of the next generation of x86 chips basically erase VMware's competitive advantage. And that spells trouble for VMware, which is probably why they are trying desparately to tie other companies to themselves.

  50. august source by epine · · Score: 2, Funny


    Instead of "open source" this should be called "august source" after the inclusive policies of the Augusta National Golf Club. Also known as "if you have to ask, we won't admit you".

  51. Xen vs. VMware, in detail by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 4, Informative
    Hi, I work on Xen but I don't officially represent the project. Anything good I say is the work of a great team, anything stupid I say is my fault... First off: I keep saying this on /. but I'll say it again - VMware _rocks_. It does an incredible task, technically and the management apps rock, from what I've heard: cluster management is very important for enterprise class virtualisation. However, I'd like to compare a few features anyhow... As I have an obvious built-in bias, you _must_ call out anything you think I haven't justified well! I'd be only too happy to respond.
    • Xen can do any networking trick you can do with Linux, *transparently* to the virtual machines: "teaming" can be done with Linux ethernet bonding, VLANs can be done too, NIC failover should be doable under Linux also.
    • SAN Multipathing should work since multipathing got merged into the mainline kernel. Xen will support any SAN hardware Linux supports. Again, this is *transparent* to virtual machines.
    • Hot backups - you can simply take LVM snapshots from the "host" to backup a VM, make CoW disks, etc. Improved support for CoW and cluster-wide virtual disk snapshotting is being worked on.
    • Live migration under Xen does basically the same job as VMotion - migrate virtual machines whilst they're still running. Xen gets excellent performance doing this - migrating running Quake 3 servers with 60ms downtime, imperceptibly to the grad students playing deathmatch ;-)
    • There is a remote management API using HTTP (Python library provided), however the management tools for Xen need _lots_ of work to get up to the level of quality VMware have set... This is in progress but there's lots still to be done. * Snapshotting VMs can again be done using LVM in the "host" but this has some limitations, so work is planned to improve this feature. * Guest OS support - Linux 2.4, 2.6, Plan 9, FreeBSD 5, NetBSD 2 (and current) can all run under Xen, ReactOS is being ported. NetBSD 3.0 and FreeBSD 6.0 are planning to include Xen support natively, as is a Real Soon Now release of mainline Linux. The lacking area is full virtualisation: Xen can't run Windows. This will be fixed by specialised hardware (Intel Vanderpool or AMD Pacifica) or by running QEmu or Win4Lin on top - if you want to run Windows virtual machines with maximal performance on current hardware you should buy VMware, it's that simple. However, it's always going to be better to have a virtualisation-aware OS than do completely full virtualisation - even with h/w assist. VMware are working on a paravirtualised API themselves for this reason
    • Some work on provisioning virtual machine installs is being done by the distros and by xen-get.org (a sort of "apt for OS installs") but I suspect ACE has the edge there for the timebeing.

    Finally, I'd like to point out that Xen is close to zero overhead for most system level benchmarks. Due to licensing restrictions (which I think are not entirely unreasonable) on VMware prodcuts, I don't have numbers for VMware's overheads. Intuitively, though, fooling an OS into thinking it's *not* in a VM requires more effort than not fooling it - VMware will always have to do more work than a paravirtualised solution like Xen, so it necessarily incurs more overhead (for now).

    Whilst I'm about it, I should also mention some more things that are under development. Yes, you can always say things are "on the way" (and I'm sure VMware have cool things in the pipe too). Nonetheless this should be arriving in the foreseeable future and since it's an OSS project it's not a secret...

    • VM replays - there's code for replaying a virtual machine deterministically so that you can watch its lifetime again from any point. A nice trick which should get implemented on top of this is a "backwards debugger", allowing you to set "reverse breakpoints", etc. This has been done for UML in the past.
    • VM forks - "fork" virtual machines to replicate services
  52. MS' Shared Source by ThinkFr33ly · · Score: 1

    This appears to be the same thing as Microsoft's shared source program.

    Interestingly, the article posting didn't contain any snide remarks or skeptical prejudgements... both of which almost certainly would have been included if this had been about Microsoft.

  53. Red Hat? by Shulai · · Score: 1

    This seems dangerous. If RH people get access to that code, they can be constrained to write code for FOSS, or eventually sued a la SCO. Especially projects like Xen, Plex86, and Bochs come to mind.

    --
    Got Pike?
  54. You can mount CD's and Floppies from remote. by cbreaker · · Score: 1

    I don't think this is a huge requirement because you can boot a CD/DVD or floppy image from a remote workstation, or use the PXE boot.

    I guess it would be good in some circumstances but I've never thought it would be a great thing to have.

    --
    - It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
  55. Speaking of VMware... by Shanep · · Score: 1

    Anyone have recent experience with running Windows XP Pro within a VMware Workstation 4 machine with Windows XP Pro as the host OS, but with both copies of XP using the same licence key? The reason I ask, is that I often run XP Pro within VMware with XP Pro as the host OS, but I am now worried that I won't be able to get updates within the virtual machine copy of XP, or worse still, somehow get both copies locked out from getting updates because Microsoft detects my copy being run on two "different" machines.

    I'll be damned if I will buy another copy of XP so that I can run it in VMware and I will be really angry if I have to ring Mega$haft to explain the situation to have it fixed and then get charged for the call. As far as I am concerned, even when I am running XP within VMware, for all intents and purposes I am running it on the machine it was licenced for.

    --
    War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
  56. Vmware for OS X by nighty5 · · Score: 1

    What I want is a native version of Vmware Workstation that will run on OS X.

    VPC is pretty watered down, and simply doesn't cut it in a number of areas outside of this post.

    With OS X being UNIX under the hood, I will be suprised if they don't consider selling it sooner or later. I mean, why give VPC all the fun on the platform?