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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."
... 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.
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.
VMWare ESX combined with VMWare Virtual Center can provide for the ability to do automatic load balancing across VMWare ESX hosts.
when you're virtuallizing MS Windows, it's anything but free. You now have to pay for a license of each virtual machine.
/. article the other day:
Not necessarily. from the
"Customers who deploy Windows Vista Enterprise have the ability to install up to four (4) copies of the operating system in a virtual machine for a single user on a single device."
The difference is somewhat semantic. Many people take emulation to mean "machine emulation" like Bochs for example, where you are emulating the entire hardware of the machine, and performance therefore sucks. What's commonly termed as virtualization emulates some items of hardware, but code is running natively on the CPU.
In reality, the terms emulation are somewhat interchangeable - you can say "full virtualization", which means the entire machine hardware is virtualized (what is commonly called emulation), and you could say "partial emulation" when referring to what is commonly referred to as virtualization. Indeed, you might even call the likes of WINE "API emulation", though that might be stretching it somewhat.
Oh no... it's the future.
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
The recently released VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 (which is basically ESX 3.0 + VirtualCenter 2.0 + some add-ons) can do this using a technique called Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS). This is basically a global scheduler running on your VirtualCenter server that works in coordination with the local schedulers in each ESX server part of the same ESX cluster.
When you hit a user-defined treshold for either memory or CPU on a VM, then DRS will trigger a VMotion of that particular VM to another ESX in the cluster without user intervention, effectively running the VM where it can run the best, based on the SLA you defined when you created it.
The cool thing about this is that you can now have a predictable cluster utilization level, regardless of where the VMs are running.
[Disclaimer: I work for VMware]
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.
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.
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..."