Skip to main content

In KVM's defense

This blogger raises some key issue on KVM. I don't think KVM is all bogus. It definitely has a massive potential. Like any other Virtualization option like rusty's Lguest, Qemu etc. I just wonder about:
  • Interoperability
  • Usability
  • Reliability
  • Production readiness


So why do these companies (and Xensource makes this statement as a company) make such statements? The answer should be not surprising: they have a lot or all to lose. KVM can be the one-in-all solution, unlike any of the others. Xensource and VMWare want to get on your system by providing a hypervisor which then can be used with all kinds of OSes. But: they are in ultimate control. The idea that there suddenly is a virtualization solution which does not need any hypervisor must be absolutely frightening to them. So, they try to suppress this no technology from the start.


Besides anything I also want to mention that innovation is a great thing. I already have Fedora Core 7 test distro and am equally anxious to try out KVM. The whole idea is to make a particular technology relevant and prevalent. Alignment of innovative goals with current consumer needs and demands is what makes a product successful. The world is moving fast. We are into a more "aspirational work and life mode". I want to be able to do things in logical, definite and implementable pieces. And all that today. I need a technology that can help me do that. I need yo use that technology to help me get my message across. It could be any sort of message. Remote management of datacenter, migration of systems, provisioning data centers from anywhere in the world or even a simple demo of the product.

We are all excited about KVM but we also need to see in which context it will be developed, maintained and eventually marketed. After all every technology has to (if it survives the run) reach an inflection point. It has to achieve the "escape velocity".

Check out Ulrich's post.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Security: VMware Workstation 6 vulnerability

vulnerable software: VMware Workstation 6.0 for Windows, possible some other VMware products as well type of vulnerability: DoS, potential privilege escalation I found a vulnerability in VMware Workstation 6.0 which allows an unprivileged user in the host OS to crash the system and potentially run arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The issue is in the vmstor-60 driver, which is supposed to mount VMware images within the host OS. When sending the IOCTL code FsSetVoleInformation with subcode FsSetFileInformation with a large buffer and underreporting its size to at max 1024 bytes, it will underrun and potentially execute arbitrary code. Security focus
Post a Comment
Read more

OS Virtualization comparison: Parallels' Virtuozzo vs the rest

Virtuozzo's main differentiators versus hypervisors center on overhead, virtualization flexibility, administration and cost. Virtuozzo requires significantly less overhead than hypervisor solutions, generally in the range of 1% to 5% compared with 7% to 25% for most hypervisors, leaving more of the system available to run user workloads. Customers can also virtualize a wider range of applications using Virtuozzo, including transactional databases, which often suffer from performance problems when used with hypervisors. On the administration side, customers need to manage, maintain and secure just a single OS instance, while the hypervisor model requires customers to manage many OS instances. Of course, the hypervisor vendors have worked hard to automate much of this process, but it still requires more effort to manage and maintain multiple operating systems than a single instance. Finally, OS virtualization with Virtuozzo has a lower list price than the leading hypervisor for comme...
Post a Comment
Read more