Hypervisor virtualization has broken out of the software development community and is rapidly becoming part of the mainstream for Windows installations. Rick Cook talks about who’s hot and who’s not quite there yet.
Pane Relief: Virtual Operating Systems
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Eugenia Loli
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i know this has nothing to do with this article at all, but where is the sunday eve column?
I’m wondering this as well!
–bornagainpenguin
shhhh… maybe if we’re quiet, it won’t happen.
An interesting article, but just a very light and simple overview.
Only the 3 main ‘contenders’ were listed:
– VMware
– Microsoft’s Virtual Server
– Xen
I’m wondering if L4Linux ( http://l4linux.org/ ) is or will be capable of doing what the Xen hypervisor is aimed at doing?
Does Parallels use this technology?
i’ve been thinking about this topic off and on since it was posted. You’d think there’d be a good joke about recylcing hypervisor from the Disco era, but I just can’t come up with it.
If you can remember the 70s, you didn’t use VM/370.
<sigh>
Not to mention Qemu http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/ which does full virtualization with the last release and the kqemu module. Windows XP is running at almost native speed on my FreeBSD laptop.
And then there’s Parallel’s Workstation http://www.parallels.com/ as well.
Sweet, I didn’t know there was a new version of QEMU out 0.8.1. Just downloaded it an testing it now. Thanks!
Everything in this article is focused on server virtualization, which is becoming a fairly mature technology with lots of choices available. But what about desktop virtualization? There are a few players in this space, such as Parallels and VMWare. But the big problem is that no one yet has been able to address the issue of virtualizing GPU hardware for desktop VMs. About the only solution that is there now is running a software emulation of a VESA driver in the VMs, which is dog slow. Does anyone know if anything serious is being done to virtualize GPU hardware for VMs so that decent 3D graphics capability can be provided to guest OSes?
VMWare actually does have virtualized hardware accelerated 3d, but with severe limitations.
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_vidsound_d3d_limitations.h…
.. But its promising that they are atleast TRYING. But +1 for wanting accelerated 3d for virtualizations as well.
Thanks for the link – I hadn’t seen that. While the Workstation product’s support of 3D in VMs is clearly still in development, I am happy to see that someone is trying to do something about this. Hopefully others are or will follow suit. I would have no problem paying $200 for a desktop virtualization solution that also provides good graphics performance. Has anyone tried the experimental VMWare solution?
I recall seeing a post a short time ago (don’t remember where) claiming that VM solutions that incorporate the use of Pacifica (AMD) or Vanderpool (INTEL) hardware technology would actually run slower in some cases than those that use only software virtualization techniques. Can anyone refute or back this claim up?
It is often said that IBM is delivering virtual machines for decades but I have to disagree with that. The writer of this article makes the same mistake.
What IBM does is actually hardware partitioning, they are in no way virtualizing and abstracting the hardware.
This is what VMware does, and what makes virtual machines flexible and easy to migrate to different hardware.
Um, no. under VM/370, there are definitely virtual machines, and it’s definitely not hardware partitioning.
VM/370 runs a hypervisor that intercepts hardware references. It is assisted by the fact that the 360 ISA is designed to support virtual machines, but it definitely partitions the CPU out among N virtual operating systems.
I can recall running UTS and MVS virtual on an Amdahl system 20 years ago, or MVS and CMCS on an IBM machine 10 years before that.