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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."

19 of 265 comments (clear)

  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 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?

    2. 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.

  2. 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 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.

    2. 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.

  3. 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 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. 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.

  5. 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 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.

  6. 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....

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

    I believe it will come bundled with Duke Nukem Forever

  8. 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
  9. 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.

  10. 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)

  11. 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.

  12. 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