Virtual Containerization

AlexGr alerts us to a piece by Jeff Gould up on Interop News. Quoting: "It's becoming increasingly clear that the most important use of virtualization is not to consolidate hardware boxes but to protect applications from the vagaries of the operating environments they run on. It's all about 'containerization,' to employ a really ugly but useful word. Until fairly recently this was anything but the consensus view. On the contrary, the idea that virtualization is mostly about consolidation has been conventional wisdom ever since IDC started touting VMware's roaring success as one of the reasons behind last year's slowdown in server hardware sales."

Comments

Containerization

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, containerization might sound like a good idea... but if you find the word 'containerization' ugly NOW, wait until you see what furry abominations grow in the containers you forget about at the back of the work server for 2 months. >_>

Re:The great thing

[niceone]

The great thing about virtual machines is that you basically can do whatever you want with them. Things you'd normally never do to your computer.

Same as virtual girlfriends.

As another software developer...

[Nursie]

... that develops applications, mostly in C, I also find it extremely useful, especially when installing software. Some installers change the state of the system, some problems only occur first time round. There is nothing else like the ability to take your blank windows VM, copy it, install stuff, screw around with it in every possible way and then when you're done just delete the thing. They also allow you to install stuff you just don't want on your native box, but need to develop against.

And you still have that blank windows install to clone again when you need it.

VMs are a fantastic dev tool.

Buzzword alert!

[drspliff]

With virtualization like linux vserver, xen, vmware etc. there are two main reasons to why people are using it.

  1) Consolidation
  2) "Containerization" or whatever their calling it today.

The company that I work for are using multiple virtual servers to be able to keep applications separate and be able to migrate them from machine to machine easier which is a common use for vmware (e.g. the appliance trend). So you're trading performance and memory usage for security and robustness/redundancy.

Across maybe 100-200 servers, the number of vservers we have is astonishing (probably around 1200 to 1500, which is a bit of a nightmare to maintain) which are hosting customer applications, when an application starts to use more resources the vserver is moved over to a machine with less servers on it, and gradually to it's own server, which in the long run saves money & downtime.

The other major industry using them is the hosting industry, allowing customers a greater amount of personalization rather than the one-size-fits-all cpanel hosting companies. This is the real industry where consolodation has increased, biting into the hardware markets possible sales because thousands of customers are now leasing shared resources, instead of leasing actual hardware.

Either way, the number of new machines (virtual) machines and ip addresses, all managed by different people is becoming a management nightmare. Now everybody can afford a virtual dedicated server on the internet regardless of their technical skills which often ends up as a bad buy (lack of memory and resource constraints compared to shared hosting on a well maintained server).

Re:Whatever happened to "Sandboxing?"

[TheRaven64]

I think it's more evidence that operating systems suck. The whole point of a modern operating system is to allow you to run multiple programs at once, without them interfering with each other. This is why we have filesystems (with permissions) rather than letting each process write to the raw device. This is why we have pre-emptive multitasking rather than letting each process use as much CPU as it wants. This is why we have protected memory, instead of letting processes trample each others' address space.

If you can't trust your OS to enforce the separation between processes, then you need to start re-evaluating your choice of OS.

Re:The great thing

[Oktober Sunset]

My computers don't usually scream when they are thrown out of the window, plus it's more of a crash than a thud when they land. Are you sure you aren't throwing your colleagues out of the window, I know a lot of office workers being dull and beige, can be mistaken for computers easily.