Operating System Virtualization

Operating System Virtualization is capturing quite a bit of buzz lately. VMWare recently released VMWare Player as free software. VMWare Player Showcases New Virtual Realities describes the new product's features. There have been several case studies about how virtualization has saved many large companies millions in hardware costs. IBM is using virtualization in its workstation and server blades technology to put multiple virtual machines into each individual blade slot. Prior to using virtualization, each blade slot represented a single machine.

In the news lately is quite a bit of buzz about virtualzation. "The Rise of the Virtual Machines" discusses various products and strategy of implementing virtualization. This is a great article covering the state of virtualization today and provides good insights into issues to keep in mind when researching this technology. IBM is doing heavy research in virtualization. See Secure Hypervisor. (What is a hypervisor?)

Just last week Red Hat said it wants Xen, the leading open source virtualization technology, to be in the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Here's the RedHat 11/1/2005 news release discussing their virtualization strategy for 2006/2007. Fedora Core 4 already includes Xen in it. (Fedora Virtualization) Red Hat is even devoting programmers to speed up the process of getting Xen integrated into the Red Hat distribution. Here are some screenshots of Xen in action.

Sun OpenSolaris is even getting into this game in order to compete with Linux. "OpenSolaris Has Virtual-Machine Edge Over Linux" describes their virtualization technology. They call their virtual machines 'Solaris Containers'.

If you have not used a virtualized machine then you have got to check out this stuff. I spent some time working with VMWare last winter and was quite impressed. I learned quite a bit about this technology during that timeframe. VMWare is pretty incredible when setup correctly.

From the research I have done with open source Xen, this looks to be even better since is designed for the Unix/Linux world. Xen implements a paravirtualization approach. Based on reports I've read, Xen performance is above and beyond what VMWare does due to implementation of paravirtualization technology. Getting Xen working is not quite that easy yet. Currently, the kernel of the guest operating system must be modified to run with Xen. However, with Xen 3.0 which is currently in alpha it will be a viable competitor to VMWare in 2006. XenSource has even gotten Windows guest operating systems working on their Xen 3.0 alpha release.

Hopefully, with Red Hat and IBM investing heavily in the open source virtualization technology, sometime next year this will become mainstream technology. Heck even Microsoft is jumping aboard on this technology. They are promising virtualization as a part of Vista, the next release of Windows. With VMWare already doing so well on Windows, I wonder how good the built-in virtualization in Vista will be? Given past history of Microsoft, I suspect it will be somewhat mediocre.

Back to the virtualization topic. If you haven't gotten into this technology yet, you will in the next few years. Within Microsoft, IBM, VMWare and the open source community this technology will only continue to grow and become mainstream in the near future.