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Inside VMware's 'Virtual Datacenter OS'

Posted by Soulskill on from the closer-look dept.

snydeq writes "Neil McAllister cuts through VMware's marketing hype to examine the potential impact of VMware's newly pronounced 'virtual datacenter OS' — which the company has touted as the death knell for the traditional OS. Literally an operating system for the virtual datacenter, VDC OS is an umbrella concept to build services and APIs that make it easier to provision and allocate resources for apps in an abstract way. Under the system, McAllister writes, apps are reduced to 'application workloads' tailored through vApp, a tool that will allow developers to 'encapsulate the entire app infrastructure in a single bundle — servers and all.' The concept could help solve the current bugbear of programming, parallel processing, McAllister concludes, assuming VMware succeeds."

1 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Re:We've come full circle by tji · · Score: 3, Informative

    They are not replacing Linux. You still run your what you want on Linux, but do you run everything on ONE Linux box? If yes, you're not a good candidate for a Datacenter OS. If you run many servers, then there is almost definitely room for efficiency in that structure.

    Rather than dedicating the full bare hardware to your App, you deploy as a VM in your Virtual Datacenter ( mini cloud ). The DCOS takes care of managing the resources, things like:

    - Moving your server VM from compute node to compute node to automatically balance load and optimize performance,
    - Move VMs to work around failures, allow hardware upgrades, etc. without downtime.
    - Expand capacity by dropping another compute node into the cloud (the big difference between the old mainframe world and the new DCOS. This scales easily with cheap powerful nodes)
    - Move the machine images around your storage infrastructure, to allow for management, maintenance, upgrade, expansion, etc.
    - Provide recovery and even fault tolerance of hardware. Servers can automatically move and re-start on hardware failure; or they can even run in lockstep to maintain full operation through a node failure.

    This is VMware's big lead (and big need to leverage, as the revenue from the hypervisor layer dries up). They provide the management layer that enables all the above, and they keep improving it. From a central GUI, I can manage all my VMs, manage the compute resources as a cluster.