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

Re:Nothing to sell here, move along

[eric-x]

Well, since there were complains from the /. community about vaporware (if not an actual product) and slashvertizements (if an actual product) we thought it would be an improvement to avoid these and hence introduce the "umbrella concept".

Re:Summary

[davester666]

In this case, if you ONLY use VMWARE products throughout your organization, then you have configured your systems properly.

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?

What about Microsoft?

[joib]

And after a few years when Microsoft follows VMWare, we'll have Microsoft DataCenter OS, abbreviated MS-DOS.