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Sun Bare Metal Hypervisors Now GPLv3
ruphus13 writes with some more news for people foretelling the death of VMware. Sun has open sourced their xVM server, their bare-metal hypervisor virtualization solution. What used to once be the cash cow for VMware is now coming under increased threat, and Sun is once again turning to the Open Source community as a weapon. "Sun xVM Server is an outgrowth of the Xen project — which raises the question of why a company would go with Sun's version rather than the Xen one. Apart from its support for SPARC and Solaris (as well as other chips and operating systems), Sun is also building a services and sales organization around a commercial version of xVM server... If you want to kick the tires or cut your costs, you can hop over to xVMServer.org, download the source (GPL 3) and join the community. But Sun is betting that, as deployments move from an initial testing phase to active usage, large organizations will be willing to pay for guaranteed support (starting at $500 per year per physical server)."
$500 bucks a year per physical server is pretty cheap in the grand scheme of things. Basically, you can try out and use it for free as you set the server(s) up, but when you go live, you can have the assurance that proper support brings. Or not. Your choice. Good move on Sun's part.
This guy's the limit!
... why a VM has to "support" a given OS such as Vista or Solaris or Linux?
FTA: "Apart from its support for SPARC and Solaris..."
Surely if these VMs truly are PCs emulated in software with standard emulated devices then surely any OS than runs on the PC architecture and has drivers for these devices will install and run on these VMs regardless?
vmware does not make its money on bare metal hypervisor. It makes a fortune, and is actually doing pretty good, on enterprise products like vmware infrastructure or virtual desktop environment.
Actually their bare metal hypervisor - ESXi comes for free as well (although not GPLed, but we're not talking about ideology here are we)
They should follow the beer-ware model. They won't get rich, but boy will they have fun!
Please put that under a new license.
More info here
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
http://kenai.com/projects/xvmserver/forums/120-Announcements/topics/59-First-open-source-release-of-xVM-Server?
This release is designed to allow interested parties to view the code - not run it. It will be some time in the future before we have all of the pieces available for you to compile and run your own copy of xVM Server.
But stay tuned, we're getting there :-)
scott
Which has a boatload of problems. The fact is there is enough competition in the market that just being able to be a hypervisor is not enough - you need to measure up and offer proprietary advantages.
The reason this release is not a big deal is that VMWare spanks the performance of every other hypervisor. VMWare ESX networking is magnitudes ahead of every single other competitor in the benchmarks.
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In other words, will this new xVM run unmodified operating systems on ordinary 32-bit hardware that doesn't have hardware VM extensions?
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and didn't put vmware out of business... arguably, sun's hypervisor isn't any different.
The installation of xVM itself on my late-model Dell desktop running a fully updated Windows XP OS but I could never get Ubuntu to install and/or run on three separate attempts. The first time, the Ubuntu install process froze. The second time, it completed but when shutting down to reboot post-install, I got hit with an near-endless stream of error messages and the OS never rebooted. The third attempt also apparently installed but wouldn't boot.
They do claim to support Ubuntu as a guest OS but my experience was a bit different. Your mileage may vary. In any case, I uninstalled it and chalked it up to simply not being ready for prime time.
-IDE drives are not supported as in who uses them in a real server anyway??
-NFS/TCP/IP/ethernet remote storage * CIFS remote storage -- as in that's not enough??
-NICS supporting the Solaris GLDv3 driver specification-- fine
-only MTUs of 1500 bytes are supported (when did you see one smaller recently??)
- Windows Server 2008 logo certified hardware-- that's about all of the servers I know, sadly.
Sun may thwart this one, too, but I'll give them a fighting chance. The model's somewhat sound but I'm eager to see the perf numbers and the real availability costs.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
xVM Ops Center supports SPARC and xVM Systems. The current version of xVM Server is focused on x86/x64 platforms, but you can use xVM Ops Center to manage Solaris virtualization technologies like Solaris Containers.
http://wikis.sun.com/display/xvmOC1dot1/Managing+Solaris+Containers+With+Sun+xVM+Ops+Center
-Steve Wilson
VP, xVM
Sun Microsystems
http://blogs.sun.com/stevewilson
I've been tracking xVM for a while now, along with the other major VM players, for my home VM setup. I've downloaded and evaluated ESXi, XenServer Express and Hyper-V. The one difference that xVM will have that the others don't is a web interface for administrating the VMs. All the others require a Windows application, which in turn requires Windows (I haven't tried using Wine). xVM Server can be administered from any platform running a decent web browser.
The other difference between xVM and other Xen-based hypervisors is the base on which it's built. Citrix XenServer is built around CentOS which is used for the Dom0 (the administrative domain). Sun have built xVM around Solaris, so benefits from the FMA (Fault Management Architecture AKA self-healing), Crossbow (virtualised network stack), Dtrace and ZFS.
There is a lot of cool technology in xVM Server and it's certainly worth a look.
Nobody wants smaller MTUs, but with 1 and 10 gigabit ethernet, they sure as hell want larger ones.
Still, that's not much of an excuse. Also worth noting that even if ZFS was GPL3 (Sun prefers GPL3 over 2, it seems), then that would still not be good enough for Linux. So yes, this is where Linus' choice of license is giving us some problems. Overall it was a good choice, but this is the bad part.
It was foolish and short-sighted for Linus to release Linux under the GPL v2 only, and not GPL v2 or later, as recommended by the Free Software Foundation. Now it is virtually (no pun intended) impossible to relicense the kernel under another license (the missing "or later" part), as there have been far too many contributors, some of whom are dead, in prison, or have otherwise vanished from the Community.
Sun prefers GPL v 3 as it does a better job of keeping the code free, particularly with respect to software patents, which, while not a problem for those of us lucky enough to be in Europe (not a problem for the moment, anyway), are certainly a concern in the US and other nations the US has bullied into adopting similar legislation.
As a result, technologies like ZFS are unlikely to ever make it into the Linux kernel. In the coming decades, as more and more technologies come along like this, Linus' inflexible licensing choice is likely to relegate the kernel to a historical footnote, where other kernels, licensed under either the "or later" clause (or other more permissive licenses) will continue. It's a pity, and I say that as one who has been using Linux since 1993, and will continue using it for the foreseeable future.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
So... disclaimer. I'm a VMware employee, so I do know all about both these benchmarks (even if I had nothing to do with them). Agree the first VMware benchmark was quite skewed, looking at Xen instead of XenSource. The XenSource benchmark showed up, it showed Xen ahead in system-call microbenchmarks (hardware virtualization does well there, but lots of system calls with no I/O isn't representative of the real world) and more or less even on everything else. VMware approved XenSource's whitepaper for publication about two weeks later (which, BTW, is no longer on Citrix's website and not visible on Google). The comparison was not apples-to-apples - XenSource switched from Xen 3.0 to Xen 3.2 in the comparison, and didn't make any software-virtualization/hardware-virtualization tweaks. In other words, XenSource's benchmark was just as skewed as VMware's. And everybody who knows anything about benchmarking knows it.
The summary of that whole mess: XenSource / Simon Crosby got more PR mileage out of making a big deal of EULA restrictions than from any actual performance comparison. They never cared about a performance comparison - it was all a PR stunt to get a great big /REDACTED/ document posted to news sites / blogs.
VMware does not forbid negative benchmarks; they do forbid stupid benchmarks. Usually, some amateur runs Passmark 2D, which is a system-call microbenchmark that doesn't even keep time correctly in a virtual machine. Every single person complaining about that EULA has never bothered submitting results - almost all submissions get approved.
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
I don't know why Geordi LaForge has to have his vision system under GPL. Let the guy see with out all the red tape! You're giving him a headache with all of this paperwork!
The summary of that whole mess: XenSource / Simon Crosby got more PR mileage out of making a big deal of EULA restrictions than from any actual performance comparison.
Wouldn't it be in vmware's best interest to get rid of the idiotic EULA restrictions then? Trying to shut people up makes you look bad. Letting people publish stupid benchmarks and then demonstrating how they're stupid makes them look bad. Openness is always the answer. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. Censorship just makes you look like you have something to hide.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Nice FUD.
No, this is not what happened at all. Simon Crosby (biggest blowhard ever), shot his mouth off proclaiming that VMware are a bunch of idiots, but he can't show it cause of the EULA. Well, unbeknownst to all his readers Xen had submitted their paper to VMware for approval, which they did approve and Xen published. It showed that Xen was competitive in most of the benchmarks, but fell short in a number and beat ESX in only 1, SPECjbb on Linux.
Good luck finding anything from this whole exchange, Citrix purged there blogs of the entire ordeal. Here is the paper WITH the data, no redactions. I am not seeing this "everywhere else Xen killed", could you point it out to me?
As a side note VMware is very liberal with their benchmark policy. As long as you actually benchmark in a sane manner they will let you publish no matter the result.
Q.
It's "astroturfing" when you try to create an impression of a grassroots support campaign. A post signed by a high-ranking company official with no attempt to hide the fact that he's representing a company is as far from that as it gets. And kudos to Sun for taking /. seriously.
I've played with Xen, we use zones in Solaris, and I've used Microsoft's Virtual Server offering, but only VMware lets me do the one thing that no one else does: Put up a machine *fast*. I mean, from nothing to a fully working Linux/Windows/whatever machine whether it's a clone from an existing guest, or a brand new one.
I have a lot of projects that are ephemeral; we need a box to test something on and boom, we have a virtual machine that runs pretty darn fast and when the testing is done, we shut it down. No muss, no fuss. No other product on the market is so good about bringing up a machine, throwing additional "hardware" at it when necessary.
The other thing VMware rocks over everyone else is snapshots; I can create branches of branches of snapshots when my testing goes in all kinds of directions, and I can always roll back to any of them. I described it to a coworker as having the entire machine on top of a Subversion repository.
Don't take it as a flaimbait, but when VMWare itself will "keep time correctly" in the guest with respect to the host? No other VM/virtualization software I've used so far exhibits this strange "clock skew" behavior.
and while not one of the heralded 4-digit user ID's, an 6-digit id starting '159' would seem to indicate he's been aware of /. for sometime as well...
The summary of that whole mess: XenSource / Simon Crosby got more PR mileage out of making a big deal of EULA restrictions than from any actual performance comparison.
So why not remove the stupid EULA restriction?
Hatta already made the point, but it is worth repeating. This is really the same issue that Lessig's Change Congress movement is about - it doesn't matter whether cash contributions skews the political process or not, the mere existence of contributions is sufficient to cast doubt on the neutrality of the political process in the mind of the populace.
It does not matter whether the EULA restriction is used only to stop stupid benchmarks, the mere existence of the restriction creates the impression that vmware has something to hide.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!