Virtualization Daily

InfoQ has an interesting interview with Jim Sherburne from BEA where he talks about BEA’s effort to run Weblogic directly on top of the hypervisor. I had posted about this previously, but this interview adds a little more info.

The first product to be released using the Liquid VM technology will be WebLogic Server - Virtual Edition in the first half of 2007. The nature of this technology is such that it can be used to support any Java application.

Creating a virtual machine on a hypervisor is pretty straightforward through the interfaces presented by the virtualization s/w vendor. Therefore, with the LiquidVM, we’ve created a s/w appliance that gets deployed within this virtual machine that automatically boots up our simplified OS layer and starts up the JVM process along with the Java class path of the application provided upon initial invocation. However, the most challenging aspects of integrating this simplified OS layer in this virtual machine environment were determining the extent of networking and low-level hardware interactions.

Liquid VM is a version of JRockit modified to sit directly on top of VMWare ESX server and with added facilities to handle the functions of an operating system. That’s kind of the opposite of what I expect to see going forward, but it’s an interesting development. What I really expect to see is the replacement of the JVM by virtual machines running applications written in the language of choice. This especially benefits scripting languages when you have a virtual appliance that bundles the OS, application and all dependancies into a module that’s even easier to deal with than Java code. I really see Java as being quite obsolete at this point even if there is of course a ton of existing Java code out in the world. We’ve been there before, and it’s kind of interesting to see how Java is rapidly becoming the Cobol of the 21st Century.