Inside VMware's 'Virtual Datacenter OS'

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."

Comments

Nothing to sell here, move along

[$RANDOMLUSER]

According to VMware execs, VDC OS will not be a product as such. Instead, it is an umbrella concept covering a range of capabilities that VMware will build into the next generation of its Virtual Infrastructure products.

So it's not just vaporware, it's an "umbrella concept" that will be built into future products.

It's just that all current OS's are lacking

[Colin Smith]

Except from IBM of course.

vmware is simply the logical extension of what the OS should be doing anyway.

or put another way.

Those who don't buy IBM kit are condemned to reimpliment (badly, and for the rest of their lives) what IBM have been doing for decades.

All of IBM's old ideas are new again

[Lictor]

VM? LPAR? Parallel Sysplex? Haven't IBM mainframes been doing this since the '70s (okay, Parallel Sysplex has only been since the '90s)?

No doubt a "cloud" of UNIX boxes is harder to marshall than a couple of zSeries though.

Re:All of IBM's old ideas are new again

[image77]

Maybe, but IBM mainframes don't use cheap off the shelf components that you can pick up at the local Fry's. You can build a small VMware cluster with HA, DRS, etc for a few thousand bucks. How much is an IBM mainframe these days?

Once you have that VMware cluster you can run your choice of 70+ operating systems and millions of apps on it. Can you run Exchange on a mainframe? Sieble? Your existing billing and accounting app?

Re:All of IBM's old ideas are new again

[image77]

Well, you can run whatever runs on Linux on top of a mainframe.

Only if you recompile those apps to run on the special versions of Linux that run on mainframes. Let's see: I can recompile my app to run on some weird offshoot of Linux on expensive, proprietary hardware or I can take it and "P2V" it onto VMware running which ever flavor of mainstream Linux I prefer? Oh, and I can P2V my Windows apps onto that same VMware cluster? And all that for a fraction of the price? Sold.

Just to be clear I'm not saying that the mainframe has no place in the modern datacenter, I'm just saying that VMware is a better fit in many situations. (And it's certainly an order of magnitude cheaper.)

And if you're a Fortune 500 corporation, chances are your existing billing and accounting applications are *already* running on a mainframe. That is, after all, what the old girl is built for.

Not sure where the F500 argument came from, but since 486 out of those 500 already use VMware I think they're already sold. (All 100 of the F100, BTW.) http://www.vmware.com/customers/

In any case, my original point remains. Mainframes are expensive and proprietary whereas VMware is cheap and offers the flexibility to run whatever app on whatever OS you choose. This new VDC-OS stuff just builds on an already good thing. We'll be happy to renew our ELA when it comes up next year.

THAT is why VMWare is on the right track with this

[khasim]

Getting traditional "silo" orientated programmers to use distributed computing is hard now!

And (for many of them) it's never going to get any easier.

It is too easy for them to just think of "one program, one OS, one machine".

Their app takes all the resources it sees from the OS it sees on the machine it sees.

So VMWare "solves" this by making it easy (for a price) for each app to believe that it has it's own machine. So the programmers can keep working they've always worked.

Re:encapsulation and abstraction

[kscguru]

6 months ago we evaluated both vmware (which we had been using in dev and test for years) and the Citrix Xen product and decided to go for Xen for our production systems based upon performance we saw (yes yes YMMV) cost, and the open nature of the API. The problem was finding a strong partner/integrator to help us swing our server estate from physical to virtual in the time allotted.

Then you missed the GP's point. If XenSource (Citrix XenSource : VMware VI as Xen : ESX) satisfies your needs, then you aren't doing anything for which you need a datacenter OS. (And if you evaluated anything more expensive than the cheapest VMware offering, you botched your product search too.)

For server consolidation and bare-bones start/stop management, there is not much difference between VMware, Xen, and Hyper-V. They all have roughly the same performance; ESX degrades least when overloaded and there's a small premium for an ESX cluster because of it. Go to the next tier where you need automated load-balancing, automated availability solutions, and automated backup, and VMware is the only game in town. (Short of IBM mainframes.)

Server consolidation != datacenter OS, despite the "me too!" claims of MSFT and Citrix. MSFT's roadmap puts them in the same ballpark in 2-3 years, Citrix 3 years back on the VMware roadmap, and VMware is there right now.