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Dell Considers Bundling Virtualization on Mobos

Posted by Zonk on from the wave-of-the-future dept.

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.'"

4 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Overwhelming Support by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Dell's gonna have a hell of a time supporting these complex features while it's closing down its call centers.

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    make install -not war

    1. Re:Overwhelming Support by QuantumRiff · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The Roseburg, OR call center closure really pissed off the town.. They gave Dell an tax exemption, saving them $5mil over 5 years.. They also spent $1mil on other "incentives" and infrastructure upgrades to attract them to the area. As soon as that Tax exemption was over, they closed down the doors.. Just before, they made some of the best techs there go over seas and train their replacements.. The employees were told they were opening up an "additional" call center, not moving theirs.. Apparently, they also were a crappy tenant and trashed the building they were in...

      I don't think Dell is going to be selling many more PC's in southern Oregon for a while...

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      What are we going to do tonight Brain?
  2. IBM does this on their iSeries by dagar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    IBM is already doing this on their iSeries (AS/400). In order to manage it you have to have a Hardware Management Console (an x86 xSeries machine running Linux and their management software). I really think that they have done a good job of the virtualization, it also lets IBM throttle back the CPU. We have a 1000CPW (IBM's performance index) machine that with the Power5 1.5Ghz processor is limited to 43% utilization. In order to get all 100% of the CPU (2400CPW), we would have to pay through the nose.

  3. Please, do not make this the only option by querist · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This frightens me on so many levels that it is difficult to know where to start. Unless that hypervisor is burned into a non-rewritable form of storage (e.g. ROM), it will be subverted.

    As it has been demonstrated at Black Hat by the illustrious Ms. Rutowska, (as well as being fairly obvious to anyone familiar with hypervisors) a hypervisor is below the OS and can be impervious to the OS's probing, but it still lies between the OS and the hardware.

    Properly implemented, this could be a very good thing. With no disrespect intended toward Dell, I suspect that the first several implementations (at least) will leave the resulting systems vulnerable to subversion, and this subversion would be difficult, at best, to detect.

    This is an interesting concept, and it could be used for "good", but as the saying goes "the devil is in the details". The idea is good, it is the potential implementation that worries me.

    Full Disclosure: I have a Ph.D. (2006) in InfoSec.