Virtualization Daily

It’s been a busy couple of weeks around the JumpBox offices and the queue of unposted virtualization topics has gotten rather large thanks to last week’s VMWorld conference. To help clear the queue here are a few quick links that I found interesting over the past couple weeks. The general theme here is the emergence of virtual appliances and the changing role of the operating system that comes along with that.

Do Operating Systems Matter?

Unfortunately this convenience does not come without a cost. As described in several of the sessions at VMWorld, the very notion of a virtual appliance blurs heavily the line between application and operating system. VMWare was, to a person, very up front about the more limited role that operating systems play in the virtual appliance world. Their contention is simple: general purpose operating systems are designed to handle a number of tasks, but only some of these are applicable in the context of a virtualized environment. Why bother including the hardware support in your operating system layer, they ask, if the application is being deployed to a virtualized environment? They propose instead that application vendors create and deliver as part of their appliance operating system layers that include only what they need.

Virtualization: Open Standards, Interfaces, and Formats

For virtual appliances to achieve their full potential, openness in virtual machine-related interfaces is critical. The real promise is “any software on any virtualization layer”. We believe customers should be able to choose and/or purchase a virtual machine consisting of any application running on any operating system and then run it on their virtualization layer of choice.

Virtualization and Licensing: What Customers Need

One area we are concerned about is that Microsoft has begun to put restrictive terms on the use of published VHDs. Specifically, Microsoft is starting to restrict use of their VHDs to MS Virtual Server and Virtual PC only (an example is the EULA that accompanies this download).

Virtual Appliances Evolve

Virtual appliances began as a means to easily demo software, a way to cut “time to trial.” VMware counts 300+ appliances. At least as of about a month ago, all were Linux-based. And much—though not all—of the software deployed in the appliances has been either Open Source or limited demoware of one sort or another. That’s only just starting to change, but a marketplace where one can buy certified virtual appliances is clearly the beginning of an evolution toward deploying at least some production applications this way.

Virtual Appliances Get IT Together

Once this is done, said Reeves when we spoke later that day, the customer doesn’t need to know or care what operating system is hosting the application — “any more than you’d ask what’s the operating system in your iPod,” he said. That was the second such comparison I’d heard that day, with a customer video during the morning panel discussion including the statement that “we download an instance of an appliance as easily as we download a song from iTunes.”