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VMware Opens Up API to Partners
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."
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.
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..
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...