Virtualization week: VMware and more

This week, VMware hosted a conference this week and much news came out. Things that stood out for me:

1. Hypervisor in the hardware: Companies are now looking to have their hypervisor (virtualization software) be part of the hardware. Unfortunately, IBM already has a leg up on them all since their hypervisor is found in their various PowerPC hardware [and probably any new x86 hardware, if they are still making any more of such servers].
   
2. JeOS (Just Enough Operating System): Canonical is releasing JeOS, a virtualization-specific Ubuntu Linux. This is a variation of KVM, but hopefully will be less painful to use than KVM (which requires specialized QEMU). Unfortunately, there are no official info about it (that I can see with Google, this morning).
   
3. Virtualization standard container proposed: Partitions (the instance of OS+apps running on the virtual machines) are saved in proprietary formats today, but Xen, VMware and Microsoft are going to standardize with one format. That's good for users of hypervisors, esp. if hypervisors becomes plug and play, or you want to move a partition from one hardware with Xen and another hardware with Viridian. Pretty soon they'll be talking about run-time version management.
   

Lots of good news coming out for the world of virtualization.

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Virtualization Versioning

We have configuration management for dealing with static items like source code and compiled binaries and even PDF documents.

However, there is, as far as I can tell, no version control for dynamic execution environment. In the days of virtualization (today), it is now possible to selectively specify the exact versions of kernel, dynamic libraries (DDL for Windows people) which are the ideal for a specific version of an application. This way, the application developer can specific the exact versions that will work with a given program. And then the user can mix and match newer or older versions of libraries and appropriate patches to ensure a reliable run-time of the application. The user can also control for variation of libraries for optimum memory usage or run-time performance or run-time stability.

Virtualization Run-Time Configuration Management (VRTCM or virtchim?) is what I have in mind.

Note that this would be a simple control of the various kernel and libraries out there that can be safely linked into a given app.

The next level would allow for virtualization of the kernel/library interfaces so that mismatched interfaces can be made to work dynamically (force incompatible versions to run together, in case one needs a newer/older library which is more secure or more reliable but not supported by the user's application).

Another level of virtualization would be to allow for user defined (for those roll-your-own hackers) patches to run in place of the official binaries available. I suppose those patches available online can be used by others as well. By using virtualized environment, the risks of virus and corruption can be much easier to control and be contained.

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.