Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 13th Aug 2007 15:53 UTC, submitted by SEJeff
"Dell's chief technology officer sees a huge future in Linux virtualisation for the once-dominant PC manufacturer. Kevin Kettler told an audience at LinuxWorld that virtualisation and Linux was no longer such an odd combination. "The two play to one another very strongly, particularly in the re-emerging trend of virtualisation," Kettler said."
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Member since:
2007-08-14
True enough! Virtualisation adds some complexity and also doesn't solve the most fundamental problem in IT nowadays: how to manage so many servers at the same time?
Server provisoning, configuration management, availability, flexibility and so on, that's the real problem, not the money you spend on hardware nor physical infrastructure (even though electricity bill are raising quite fast lately in the datacenters). Sun got it right there when they moved all their product strategy toward providing a flexible "Operating Environment".
Also Kettler's demo is the classical marketing stuff, full of non-sense and technical inanities. What the heck does he means by "embedding the hypervisor"? Doing some kind of blackbox appliance such vmware esx server? Then since he made all his demo with Xen which is useless without a linux dom0, they will compete with Vmware but also XenSource and all the other linux distro since they all have a similar product. What's the interest for Dell? Selling Xen-certified servers?
Honestly, even though Xen was an interesting hack back in the time when HVM did not exist and it required the host OS to be modified. But since Dell is talking about running unmodified OS, they'll require HVM along with Xen.
And on that segment (full virtualisation with HVM) Xen is a bloated hack compared to KVM (kvm.qumranet.com). KVM is technically so superior to Xen microkernel approach that it's already included in the linux kernel and that its development has nearly overtook Xen in 1 year time even though less people were working on it at the time. Since then the kernel hackers interest has raised and it now includes stuff such a swap for the host allowing memory overcommitting that Xen doesn't have (and probably never will as this is a design limitation afaik).
So even amongst the full machine virtualisation space, Dell went for the wrong partner. Instead they should be contributing to KVM or even better helping the join effort of the container guys (Eric Bierdmann, Paul Menage, devs from vserver, openvz and IBM/Meiosys) who aim at providing lightweight system virtualisation, freeze/migrate habilities for the processes and so on.