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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."
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?
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make install -not war
The virtualization software is free, but when you're virtuallizing MS Windows, it's anything but free. You now have to pay for a license of each virtual machine. This can make the cost go up a lot. You'd probably be better off not virtualizing, and just hosting everything off of a single non virtualized server.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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!
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?
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I don't know about binaries, but couldn't you just down load the source from and compile it for the Mac? After all, Mac's dev tools are free.
Actually, most minor utilities are unnecssary (for instance, defragmentation occurs on the fly in Mac OS X). But they certainly are free. Most Windows utilites, like ones to recover files (something you have to do regularly on the WIndows side of computing) do cost money. I work in IT supporting both Mac and PC. Macs are much easier to support. Both platforms have their share of newbies and experienced users. But Windows poops out a lot more than Mac. We still have users content with their circa 2000 G4 Power Mac towers humming away. PC's equally as old suck (and have been granted community use status in the offices' common areas since no one wants them or sent to the surplus gods).
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...
Agreed, MacOS is severely lacking in the virtualization department. As a long time user of VMWare, I can say that Parallels doesn't stack up in comparison. Lack of multiple snapshots and, well, a general lack of the snappiness I've come to expect from VMWare on Linux or Windows is missing. VMWare's lack of product for MacOS X is especially disappointing to me as a new Intel iMac owner.
In other news, I've thought that VMWare and Apple were really missing a great opportunity with respect to virtualization. Apple wants to limit the hardware that MacOS X will run in to Apple blessed hardware. This is for two reasons: 1. They want to drive sales of Mac hardware. 2. It's a pain to support lots of models of PC.
If Apple and VMWare were to partner to release a free MacOS X virtual machine, it would allow Apple to get OS X into the hands of more prospective customers. (I haven't met a person who has *used* OS X for any length of time and not loved it.) Such an arrangment would also be good publicity for VMWare. VMWare already has a product that allows for some lockdown of virtual machines (VMWare ACE). Such an arrangement wouldn't violate Apple's goals with MacOS X (limited hardware support overhead, and MacOS X would be much more desireable on native hardware for OpenGL and whatnot). Such a move would certainly drive sales. All of a sudden millions of Windows users potentially get sucked up into Apple's product upgrade cycle: VMWare --> Mac hardware.
I wrote about this on my blog (blog.thoughtspot.net) a while back, but Dreamhost appears to be taking a dirt nap at the moment.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
http://darwinports.org/
http://developer.apple.com/opensource/index.html
http://www.kberg.ch/q/
http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/
My advice is
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2. Post to Slashdot
Wishful thinking, I know.
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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.
ESX is a cash cow and EMC owns VMWare. Until Microsoft gets into the enterprise SAN space I don't think VMWare has too much to worry about since ESX and EMC products are pretty much tied together.
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.