VMware, Cisco Plan Data Center OS

Lucas123 writes "John Webster over at Computerworld says VMware and Cisco plan to develop a Data Center OS that would consist of a data center cloud populated by servers, storage, and Cisco's 'intelligent' networking gear, all managed by Cisco and its partners — starting with VMware."

Comments

Confused.

[MrCrassic]

Is this implementation going to set up virtual servers aligned as a data center, for which virtual computers can access? Or is this an idea for a completely custom virtualization-based operating system that offloads one huge datacenter onto single computers?

If either is the case, how is that any different than either setting up a test server (or servers) with VMware computers all connected to each other using physical connections, or just having multiple VMware sessions on one computer all interconnected using a single connection?

Re:Confused.

[jhfry]

I think what they mean by "Data Center OS" is that they are developing an OS that utilizes an entire datacenter as it's resource... rather than a series of discrete systems that are linked by their OS's.

Essentially I imagine it will be similar to the way a mainframe acts... a large number of resources, all controlled by a single OS. But instead of a single manufacturer implementation, this will be a proprietary "standard" that allows 3rd party components to be added to the cloud and become available to the "OS"

It's actually a great idea... it's the next evolution from virtualization... Why should a data center admin need to ever concern themselves with the individual servers and storage devices... instead they just add another processor (server), storage device (NAS array), or external network, and the OS will utilize it as it chooses.

I'd imagine that if it is properly executed, it will greatly improve utilization and make managing the data center infinitely easier as all you do is plug the device in and it is automatically assimilated into the system.

All I hope is that they make it a true industry standard, it would suck if only a combination of Cisco, Dell, and EMC devices (for example) would work with the new "OS".

Re:Confused.

[jrexilius]

This is in essence what my company (http://hostedlabs.com/) does. We take it a step further and "cluster" multiple datacenters into a single system. Although what we do is not based on virtualization more on underlying OS and altering programming language internals to make it transparent to the application.

In essence they get to the same place but ours is more limited and geared towards a particular class of application running on the LAMP stack. Also the problems we were trying to solve when building it was not utilization but scaling, availability and performance. We are actually kind of wasteful of hardware currently but as we grow we get more and more efficient. Economies of scale thing.

Re:Confused.

[nine-times]

this will be a proprietary "standard" that allows 3rd party components to be added to the cloud and become available to the "OS"

It's actually a great idea...

The part that isn't so great about it is the "proprietary" part. I guess it depends on the implementation and how open the "standard" is. But having worked in IT for several years now, I've become increasingly convinced that closed standards and proprietary systems just aren't acceptable. What inevitably happens is that this terrific idea and great set of standards will work great... so long as you set everything up exactly the way the vendor wants. That usually includes throwing a large amount of money into buying other loosely related products from the same vendor, buying interacting products from the vendor's partners, and paying a shit-ton of money to the vendor's "certified" consultants. And then you're locked in, and you have to deal with that vendor's quirks and problems, or else pay all that money again to start the whole process over with a competing vendor.

And of course, the whole "standard" won't really be built to function optimally to solve the problem it's built to solve. It will have random bullshit built in to ensure that the standard can't be used by the vendor's competitors. They'll make sure the standard can't be used with anything other than "approved" hardware and software. The result of all that is that you can't use the product the way you want, and also that the product doesn't quite function properly because they're trying to keep you from doing what you want.

I guess I just question whether a proprietary standard should be considered a standard at all. I'm not against proprietary software, but I'm mighty tired of proprietary software developers refusing to use standards that allow their product to work with competing products. Maybe it's just me and I'm crazy or something, but free interoperability between systems always ends up being this huge hurdle to getting things done, and I'd hand over my money more readily if some proprietary software/hardware vendor would ease those problems instead of exacerbating them. Why don't these companies actually try making things easier for IT pros for a change, instead of just giving us some new complicated non-functional inconvenient POS to try to figure out?

(Sorry for the rant. I've had a bad month.)

Where this will end up..

[JackMeyhoff]

UTILITY Computing, IBM's wet dream. Also, game hosting in the cloud. No more installing clients, you play in virtual clients. Game houses wet dream. Thin clients, Oracles wet dream.

Re:And it all starts with...

[Hatta]

IIRC, ESX only ships with linux in the service console. The actual vmkernel is not based on linux.

License costs?

[Colin Smith]

I keep looking, going "holy fuck", then shelving the idea for another year.

I know the architecture I want. Just can't justify it... Xen might.

It's Buzz-word-licious!

[machinecraig]

TFA was pretty short on details - but coupled with this release from the folks at BEA, which basically allows a Weblogic app server to run directly under VMware (no other OS required); it may give a clue as to future direction. I'll take it all with a grain of salt.

OMG it's a cluster!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Take ZFS for filesystem clustering. Add Beowulf for processor clustering. Tip hat to 20-year-old VAXcluster technology, and 40-year-old IBM utility computing.

What am I missing, please? Apart from buzzwords like "cluster computing" and "intelligent gear".

Why not...

[symbolset]

A vm on every desktop for serving stuff, with some management glue to make it look like the vm is running on a server in a rack?

Is it not time for that yet?

Xen

[athloi]

A new battle's shaping up. Citrix, known for remote management software, has acquired XenSource. Symantec has a management utility. So does Microsoft/Novell. Should be a good fight.

I'm looking forward to a return to big iron or something like it. The quality of hardware, and the amount of thought that went into the operating system, software and configuration, was much higher. Big Iron is like the aristocracy of computing.

An interesting article from last year on this topic

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2004075,00.asp

Looking forward to the Cert Test!

[SoupIsGood Food]

Since this is Cisco we're talking about, I'm looking forward to long nights memorizing oddball commands to pass the certification test. I can almost feel the one-coffee-too-many burning a slow ulcer into my esophagus while puzzling over the two-and-a-half bibles thick study guide.

Cisco makes mad, crazy money from certification tests. It's a way they can squeeze another dime from both out-of-work and desperate tech workers as well as companies confused as to exactly what their CIO bought when he went to play golf and came home with the Cisco polo shirt (and, oh, yeah, some contract or something. My name is going to be in Business week, and I got a shirt!)

Money all around, and all they need to do is pretend the advances in modern GUIs, scripting tool, shells and command line utilities the rest of the industry uses don't exist.

Now they want to take this esoteric-for-esoteric's-sake aesthetic across the entire enterprise! On the one hand, having that certification will mean a huge pay jump, as no-one will be able to design, deploy or maintain the sumbitch... I won't either, but I'll be making lots of money calling in Cisco consultants to do my job for me. I might get them to bring me a polo shirt. On the other, you will never be able to bring into the server room a new technology that Cisco/VMWare doesn't want in the server room, regardless of whether or not it's the right thing for your organization. It's like Bad Old IBM all over again if this thing gets any traction.

Data Center OS has detected a license violitation

[asv108]

Datacenter 1 is going down due to a license violation. Please contact licensing@cisco.com or rerun the genuine datacenter advantage tool.

Cisco might still be able to get away with having proprietary networking gear, but there is no way most organizations will move to proprietary for entire data centers.

In other news...

[ejamie]

Shortly after the first Cisco Datacenter OS is brought online, it becomes self-aware alarming its creators at its newfound abilities. When the lab rats attempt to shutdown the datacenter, "CDOS" defines all tape operators as its enemy and decides to terminate their mount tape requests. 3 billion digital bytes are destroyed within milliseconds.