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Dell Considers Bundling Virtualization on Mobos
castrox writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Dell may be considering bundling virtualization on some of their motherboards. No more dual boot or VMs inside the running OS? 'Any way you slice it, though, putting the hypervisor in a chunk of flash and letting it handle loading the OS is the way forward, especially for servers and probably even for enterprise desktops. Boot times, power consumption, security, and flexibility are all reasons to do this ... The big question is: which hypervisor will Dell bundle with its machines? Vance suggests hypervisors from XenSource and VMware as two options, but I think that VMware is the most likely candidate since it seems to be the x86 virtualization solution of choice for the moment. However, if Dell doesn't try too hard to lock it down, this system could easily be modified in an aftermarket fashion to include almost any hypervisor that could fit on the flash chip.'"
For that matter, who needs to?
You can get the benefits of this yourself.
1) Download Damn Small Linux.
2) Install on a USB pen drive.
3) Add Xen Source (or VMWare) hypervisor
4) ???
5) Profit! (sorry, couldn't resist)
My blog
I think PS3s already get shipping with a built-in hypervisor to manage installing guest OSs in VMs on the console. Ostensibly it's a feature, but doing so has given them enough control to prevent access to accelerated graphics so people don't use the console to play games they downloaded and are instead forced to buy. There's certainly precedent for this, and we're sure to see a lot more of this in the future. Hopefully the PC market is competitive enough that Dell won't be restricting their own hypervisor to restrict certain hardware access, or only allow the use of VMs from "trusted" sources. If this is true, then this is excellent news.
Presumably having Dell's hypervisor load instantly at power-up could prevent other virtualizers from running, including hypervisor-based rootkits like Blue Pill.
Close.
A few tips on calling Dell tech support if you are a competent engineer who diagnosed the problem before reporting it.
1. For a home PC the techs are so incompetent that it's easier to just lie about the nature of the problem. I.e. If your hard drive is on the fritz, making rattly sounds and loosing data just say "The drive is completely dead. When I connect it the BIOS doesn't even admit that it's there".
2. Gold support is better than economy or even silver, but not for the reasons on dell.com. It's better because they connect you to the most competent support guys almost immediately when you call the gold support line. Competent engineers know when they are speaking to an equal and will dispatch the required parts immediately. They also send out "just-in-case parts".
3. Call late at night if your warranty allows it. The brightest tech support guys in Texas know that the graveyard shift is the best time to work. Less traffic on the commute, more pay and more time available for none work related tasks. Your shortest and most fruitful calls will be at 2:00 AM.
4. Don't be afraid to hang up. I once had an external tape drive (PV 110T) that was bursting tapes whenever I initiated a backup. The tech support guy insisted that I must reboot the server so I could see if the drive shows up in the BIOS before he could go any further. I hung up, called back latter and got a brighter support guy who dispatched a replacement drive in around 5 minutes.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
HTH
You are right - company policy is company policy. But. Keep in mind that not every agent is going to follow company policy every time. Years ago I worked Dell tech support and I would regularly have to deal with getting customers that had previously dealt with someone who didn't follow policy. I'd spend an extra five to fifteen minutes telling them that, yes, I really did have to do it the way I was doing it. I really didn't feel like taking the approximately 4% chance that someone was listening to my calls and loose my job.