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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)
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
Oh, and one more thing. Read that wiki article you posted. The CDDL isn't the problem, it's that Linux's license doesn't permit linking. Not the other way around.
So, why not quit complaining about the permissive license ZFS is under, and start complaining about the restrictive license Linux is under? ( your post should read "Please put Linux under a new license" )
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.
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
Linux is Linux because it was at the right place ( PC's ) at the right time ( BSDi getting sued, no other free UNIX, no UNIX that was worthwhile for the 386 ), nothing more nothing less.
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
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.