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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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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....
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 : )
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.
;-) 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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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