Slashdot Mirror
Virtualization Goes Mainstream
InformationWeek is reporting that, during the same week that Microsoft announced the free price for Virtual PC, VMWare 1.0 was released for free as well. Though there were already many free options for virtualization available, these major products signal a shift in the industry. From the article: "There are many ramifications here. Obviously, the slew of products means network managers can now adopt virtual servers into their overall strategies and don't have acquisition costs providing a justification to avoid it. Other than the very-high-end VMware ESX and the midline Microsoft Virtual Server on mainstream XP platforms, virtualization is essentially free wherever you might want to use it."
virtualization is essentially free wherever you might want to use it.
Unless your host OS happens to be Mac OS.
Now Slashdot can dupe twice as much.
Is there a VMWare that distributes tasks across a network of VMWare hosts automatically? So I can just add new hosts to a network to make all the apps run faster? And install apps on a single machine, from where VMWare redistributes the load without my direct intervention?
--
make install -not war
... virtualization is essentially free wherever you might want to use it.
Then again, first hit is always free.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Virtualization is a safe and fairly easy way to try new things or see how security measures may or may not work in a controlled environment. I'm a lowly IT guy who repairs broken Windoze boxes, so I couldn't imagine how useful it is for enterprise, but for the slightly above average user, it's great to test out new ideas or operating systems. Don't get me started on Parallels on OS X, because I'll go Mac fanboy for several pages on how cool that is. I'm quite glad that virtualization is getting so much attention lately. Interest often leads to more innovation!
Especially interesting since the newly released Core2Duo is the first x86 CPU with hardware support for virtualization.
Since I don't claim to have any experience dealing with VMWare, and only passing experience with VirtualPC (and, previously, SoftWindows) on Mac, can someone explain to me how this is different from emulation? Is it different from emulation? I've kept one x86 workstation around my home running Win98 (and dual-boot with Slackware) for a small handful of applications and a few games. The notion of making the machine Slack-only and running Windows virtually with no performance hit from emulating is attractive, but I am quite ready for my assumption to turn out flawed. Could someone with a greater clue than I've got educate me?
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
If Microsoft releases something for free they're being anticompetitive and evil.
If open source zealots release something for free they're making the world a better place even though all they're really doing is increasing Stallman's power through viral licensing conditions.
How much money does Stallman give to charity again?
Is how much overhead does virtualization take up? At what point do you actually need another box because of the performance hit?
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
OK. So Microsoft makes Virtual PC free. Suddenly everyone starts using virtualization software and (besides the licensing fees Microsoft will get for each copy of its OS that is virtualized) it's free and wonderful and everyone is happy that they can run all of their Operating Systems on one PC with much less hassle than before. Virtualization takes off, new uses are discovered for it, and it changes the way networks can be used. Hooray!
But eventually Microsoft stops maintaining Virtual PC (and discontinues support for it on any future operating systems) and decides to release Microsoft's new "Virtual Console" software that costs mucho bucks. Suddenly everyone that relies on Virtualization realizes that they'll either have to switch to some other virtualization software, change their software systems entirely, or simply bite the bullet and spend the money to upgrade to the new program.
This probably isn't news to anyone. In fact, it's the way things have been done since the first closed-source software program was created and sold. But I think that this is a perfect example of where Open Source software could really fit the bill and cause a paradigm shift to a better world where people aren't locked into one provider or another. If the OSS community could pull together and release a killer Virtualization app that's free as in speech perhaps people would start to see *why* software needs to be free, and perhaps they would realize it goes deeper than simply price.
I'm not trying to spread Microsoft FUD or spread the OSS gospel... but I think in scenarios like this an OSS alternative would be a no-brainer. Are there any OSS virtualization software suites in development right now (besides Wine)?
I like my women how I like my sugar.. granulated.
1. Wait...
2. EU's windows-based PCs are infected with viruses and crash causing loss of all records relating to fines against Microsoft.
3. Profit!!
Microsoft can, of course, afford to play this "free" game until the cows come home. I hope VMware can survive this. While sysadmins (okay, maybe not MSCE "sysadmins") will likely continue to choose the VMware solution, in the end we all know deployment is often affected by drive-by management decisions.
#DeleteChrome
Xen is going to blow everything out of the water when the openmosix patches get finished. KABLOOMEY to everything else, though I could see still using vmware ESX for businesses that still have to use windows.
that you may have to deal with 4 instances of WGA?
:wq
Unless your host OS happens to be Mac OS.
Mac OS as host OS? Oh, please. Why not Amiga OS?
For OSX as a host and guest there is a solution: > http://www.kberg.ch/qemu/
http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme/?entr y=virtualization_meme_ver_3_0
"Dejanews shows a sharp increase in virtualization at the end of 2005", first posted on May 15th, 2006
I've spent 10 hours over the last two days trying to get Windows XP working on Xen. I bought all the right hardware, followed all the right instructions, and hit a wall. I've found other people with the same problem (e.g. http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-users /2006-06/msg00452.html) and some of them got around it... others didn't.
:(
I've tried IRC, I've read the docs, I've even rebuilt the FC5 kernel RPMs with some patches, but nothing works.
Wake me when virtualisation on Linux is as simple as it is on OS X with Parallels. I should have saved the money I spent on the chip and the board for a new Intel Mac
Now you can run same spyware multiple times at the same time.
The low-end versions of Vmware do run on top of linux or Windows, but VMWare ESX runs on it's own proprietary micro-kernel with linux running right on top of it as the management interface. As a result, ESX has much lower overhead than the other versions which run on top of other OS's. With ESX 2.5, the linux part is bolted on pretty tightly and can't be assigned resources like virtual machines, whereas, the new version (3.0) of VMware is more independent of the linux management interface. 3.0 runs the linux part as a virtual machine, which can be allocated resources just like all of the other virtual machines.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
There are virtually many virtual ramifications here. Obviously, the virtual slew of virtual products means virtual network managers can now virtually adopt virtual servers into their overall virtual strategies and don't have virtually any virtual acquisition costs providing a virtual justification to virtually avoid it. Other than the virtually very-high-end virtual VMware ESX and the virtual midline Microsoft Virtual Server on virtual mainstream XP virtual platforms, virtualization is essentially virtually free wherever you might want to virtually use it. What the virtually fuck are we virtually talking about ??????????????
I tested VMWare Server a few days ago.
...etc.) would work on a virtualized Windows machine inside Linux or not. This is my next test.
I installed it under Windows XP, on a Pentium 4 HT 3.0 Ghz, 1 GB machine. It did not ask for a reboot (good thing).
Then just for fun, I installed Kubuntu 6.06 in it. It works, but you feel it is slow. So, it would not be something that I would run regularly.
I was hoping to run VMWare on Linux, and having Windows inside a VM for testing stuff. Not sure if Voice applications (e.g. Yahoo Messenger, MSN,
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Someone really needs to poke your eyes out...
For those that don't want to carry their laptop from home to work and back again (not using on on the road), virtualization is a great option. I created a win'98 image with all kind of useful stuff and carried it to university and back home on a USB flash drive. When I get to a PC with VMWare installed, I load my environment and have everything configured, along with the latest copy of my files. Also great for demonstrating how your software works on a PC you don't own. You'll get your complete and familiar environment.
External HDDs also work well, but they won't fit inside a shirt pocket.
The best part about SVS is the ability to run mulitple version of the same product at thee same time. For example Office 97 and Office 2003 if you have specific work applications. Or the beta of Firefox along with the released version of Firefox without corrupting anything. Its a great product.
Funny, I always thought that when things used to cost money and now they're giving them away, that's called market failure.
Water falls from the sky and we still pay for it. How badly is virtualization tanking that they need to charge less than water?
The key to this is the fact that Xen is about to go mainstream: more specifically, Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 is about to be released, which will be the first Enterprise Linux with Xen included.
I've noticed that VMWare is still charging for their Workstation product, even as they're giving away VMWare Server. From the website, it seems that they have a more or less identical set of features. (They approach the products from quite different perspectives, so it's hard to compare them.)
Can anyone knowledgeable tell me what the difference between the Workstation and Server is? (I'm currently a happy owner of an older version of Workstation and want to know if I should upgrade Workstation or switch to Server.)
Many thanks.
I've been using VMware server for Ubuntu 6.06 and Windows Vista beta 2. It has a certain cool factor to it, and Ubuntu runs fast enough that you could run at least 2 applications, such as Firefox and GAIM, but for actual work on a CPU without VT support, it's extremely painful. And without graphics hardware virtualization (which ATI and Nvidia better integrate soon in their GPUs), running even a GUI like Vista Standard is slow and cumbersome.
External HDDs also work well, but they won't fit inside a shirt pocket.
Sure they will. I have a Transcend StoreJet and it's really tiny and light. In fact, it's a bigger hassle to carry the cable than the drive.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
So the real comparison with the new "free" VMWare should be against VS 2005, and not against Virtual PC which is just a desktop emulation app.
Not saying one is better than the other -- just compare the same type of fruit when making your own decisions. The article is badly written or it's writer didn't understand what he was writing about.
Quoth he
"It's all academic anyway..."
It seems like Microsoft considered VMWare enough of a threat to try to use the "Free" weapon against them (Virtual Server), and VMWare retaliated in kind without even flinching (VMWare Server). This caused Microsoft to one-up them again by releasing the Virtual PC 2004 (desktop line) version and all future versions of the standard desktop VPC for free.
Funny thing is.. it looks like the licensing and featureset for the free version of VMWare makes it pretty much unattractive for a large corp to use anything but the high-end pay edition; I'm not sure how Microsoft's setup compares. I haven't had a chance to look yet.
If the host OS is Server 2003 Enterprise, then you get up to four VM licenses for free. It also doesn't matter if the infrastructure is Virtual Server or VMware (or anything else). We consdolidated a few servers and saved nearly $20K in licensing.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Yes, WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is not virtualization software. But you have to be pretty ignorant to call it a "hack". Making the Windows GUI APIs work under Linux takes some fairly sophisticated programming. You can't just say, "oh, the app wants me to create a Windows frame, I'll create a GTK frame instead." You have to do event handling, implement a lot of screen widgetry, and a lot of other stuff that's non-trivial.
You're also being a little dim if you think Xen is the reason Virtual PC is free. Xen does not run under Windows. Virtual PC runs only under Windows. Also, Xen does not run guest OSs "out of the box" — you have to have a special port.
Nor does Xen have anything to do with VMWare being free — because it's not. Yes, VMWare Server is free, but VMWare workstation is still $189.
OpenMosix is lacking manpower. The 2.6 rewrite is taking forever and along with that, the AMD64 stuff. Who knows if migSHM will be back? The last release of OM was for 2.4.26 in December, 2004. Perhaps VMware is the way to go, at least this year. OM for 2.4 works pretty well, but who wants to run 2.4 as i386 on the latest hot AMD64 cluster? I am designing one at the moment and the whole mission is to spend hard on the servers and to maximize bang for the buck. Load balancing is key. I would rather use OM than VM with the hit of duplicate OS memory. At the moment, I am planning to use a round-robin or manual approach to starting processes and pray the law of averages works. If I start 10000 processes on four servers will the CPU/IO hogs land on different machines? Cannot remember my perms and combs so I may do a monte carlo simulation...
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
Are there any virtualisation things which let the guest OS have direct access to parts of the hardware, eg so that I can run copy-protected games inside a windows VM inside linux? (at least, the ones which rely on the CD containing special data in non-standard areas)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Is that snapshot system is just awesome. I manage lab images using it, makes PITA software installs safe. Snapshot, try it, roll back if it doesn't work. You can shanphot at every step of the way to roll back to different locations and try different things.
Also what makes it all possible is their cool P2V tool. I build a system with the OS and drivers it needs, then I use P2V to take it and reconfigure it for a VM. However, P2V doesn't damage the orignal configuration. So when I take a Ghost image of the virtal machine and push it back out to the physical hardware, it works just as it did orignally. It's really made maintinence of the labs much easier and means that when someone wants to do a class that is going to require a fully customized image, not just a software install, we can make it happen fast, and then revert things when we are done.
Thus far, I haven't seen any other vendors, comercial or OSS, that offer the tools to make all that happen.
Take a host running a 32-bit OS, either Windows (yuck) or Linux. Boot a virtual machine into a 64-bit OS. It works!
For anybody who knows anything about how x86-64 CPUs work, this is obviously an insane hack. They must be switching into long mode to run the 64-bit OS, then switching back to deal with the host.
Going the other way, 32-bit on 64-bit, is also insane. Every IRQ means switching back into long mode, out of what may even be real mode or virtual x86 mode. Woah...
Load VM Ware on the latest/greatest G4 HP Proliant box - running Quad Xeon's and like 8GB of RAM then just for kicks - in a VMWare session install and then run Windows 3.1!
Anyone who can remmeber this dark age of computing - and can remember how long that POS OS took to load will get a huge kick out watching it run like this.
You say go and BAM! Instant Windows 3.1 - You won't even see that stupid flash screen it used to load
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Running a 32-bit app on a 64-bit OS is easy. The processor does the switch easily and automatically, just by loading a code segment with the long-mode bit set correctly. This is nearly free.
VMWare is doing witchcraft. All sorts of screwy data structures must change. There is the GDT, the IDT, numerous control registers... It's so insane that neither Windows nor Linux is able to support 16-bit apps on a 64-bit kernel. (because 64-bit can not service 16-bit, and thus you'd need to become 32-bit in order to get into 16-bit)