OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/20379/OS_and_Virtualization_or_Virtualization_and_OS_ Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2013, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Sun, 19 May 2013 23:02:55 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com VMware is right for now http://www.osnews.com/thread?333351 http://www.osnews.com/thread?333351 I use VMware ESX a lot, but I do believe that it and also expensive SANs exist mainly due to the overwhelming desire to use cheap commodity OSs and servers in applications that demand just a little bit more than commodity stuff is built for.

Take for example Windows. Can it do volume snapshots and clones? Is it wise to run several "main" apps on one big OS image? Is it easy to measure performance? Is it built for high availability? Can sysadmin errors be easily reverted? Is bare metal recovery easy? Is server provisioning easy?

The answer to all of these questions is now mostly "yes" , but it was "no" or "not really" until fairly recently, meaning during the period that x86 virtualization gained popularity. That it made it possible to rehost legacy Windows apps from the dark ages made it even more attractive.

Adding a lower layer like VMware or a SAN fixes some of these deficiencies while still keeping Windows Windows, which keeps businesses happy because they can continue to hire cheap people and reduce cost of acquisition. Whether this actually saves money is anybody's guess, but I think VMware is a good answer to "never mind how we got here, now that we're here, what do we do?"

ESX currently leads everybody on features. It's anybody's guess what'll happen as commodity OSs get better. But for now, I think the "hypervisor below the dumb commodity OS" model makes the most sense. Sat, 11 Oct 2008 23:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (jwwf) Comments The question no ones asks is WHY? http://www.osnews.com/thread?333362 http://www.osnews.com/thread?333362 Why do we need to run all these SEPARATE OS's?


On a VMS system or a mainframe, or hell on UNIX like Solaris, and HPUX we could run lots and lots of different applications ALL ON THE SAME system. We could manage them all independently, patch them they would co-exist well, etc...


Seems like a huge waste of resources to have to run TWO whole operating systems just because you can't run Oracle and MSSQL on the same server.


Maybe its because Windows when you get down to it is still A SINGLE USER DESKTOP OS, which had a few features SLAPPED on it to make it look like a server.Edited 2008-10-12 00:54 UTC Sun, 12 Oct 2008 00:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Milo_Hoffman) Comments RE: The question no ones asks is WHY? http://www.osnews.com/thread?333414 http://www.osnews.com/thread?333414
Maybe its because Windows when you get down to it is still A SINGLE USER DESKTOP OS, which had a few features SLAPPED on it to make it look like a server.

Windows became multi user in 1993 with the release of Windows NT. You are talking about Windows 9x or earlier which was indeed crap. Sun, 12 Oct 2008 16:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Bending Unit) Comments RE: The question no ones asks is WHY? http://www.osnews.com/thread?333430 http://www.osnews.com/thread?333430
Why do we need to run all these SEPARATE OS's?


It is my understanding that the separation that a process has from another process inside an OS is trivial vs. a wall between another process and a Hypervisor + OS. Thus you get some additional security. Sun, 12 Oct 2008 21:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (pcunite) Comments RE[2]: The question no ones asks is WHY? http://www.osnews.com/thread?333431 http://www.osnews.com/thread?333431 NT is not multi-user in the true sense of the word... it is single user with profiles etc...

Vista is supposed to be the first true multi-user Windows OS, but I haven't used it or looked into it deeply enough to really talk about that. Sun, 12 Oct 2008 21:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Lunitik) Comments RE[3]: The question no ones asks is WHY? http://www.osnews.com/thread?333450 http://www.osnews.com/thread?333450 I'm not sure how you can justify your statement. Windows has supported multiple users logging in at the same time since NT 4 with Terminal Services. Before Terminal Services, you could have multiple remote users at a time, but the graphical system was tied to the single console user so your statement would have been accurate for those versions of NT.

But TS is more than a decade and a half old by now and it's been in consumer OSes since the advent of XP. Mon, 13 Oct 2008 03:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (PlatformAgnostic) Comments Simple answer http://www.osnews.com/thread?333451 http://www.osnews.com/thread?333451 How useful is an OS not run inside a VM?

How useful is a VM without OS to run inside it?

There's your answer. Mon, 13 Oct 2008 04:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (deathshadow) Comments RE[4]: The question no ones asks is WHY? http://www.osnews.com/thread?333453 http://www.osnews.com/thread?333453 Multiple user accounts is not the same as being a multi-user OS. There is no true separation between users logged in, etc. Mon, 13 Oct 2008 05:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Lunitik) Comments RE[5]: The question no ones asks is WHY? http://www.osnews.com/thread?333539 http://www.osnews.com/thread?333539 It's considered a security bug in the system if one non-administrative use of a Windows machine can affect another user. The only thing one user is able to do to another by design is DoS them via excessive CPU and resource consumption. The system as of Vista/WS08 has strong resource quota support, so this scenario can be prevented if you're willing to put up with a significant management burden (I'm not sure how good Windows Server Resource Manager is... never used it).

Can you elaborate on the differences between 'true separation between users, etc' and what Windows provides? Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (PlatformAgnostic) Comments