Skip to main content

Virtualization: Qumranet goes public with Solid ICE

A desktop virtualization vendor that's been operating in stealth mode, Qumranet, has emerged as one of the first companies to make use of the KVM virtualization engine, already implanted in the Linux kernel.

Few developers know much about KVM. It was added to Linux kernel 2.6.20 in October 2006. KVM is a hypervisor capable of making use of the virtualization assists built into the latestIntel (NSDQ: INTC) and AMD (NYSE: AMD) chips. Those hardware hooks simplify some of the complexity in the x86 instruction set, giving KVM a lean and mean profile at just 12,000 lines of code.

Qumranet is offering one of the first virtualization products to be built on top of KVM. That may be because the lead KVM developer, Avi Kiviti, and several other developers are part of the startup, which has offices in Netanya, Israel, and Sunnyvale, Calif.

Qumranet made its debut Monday at the Demofall 07 show in San Diego, emphasizing its desktop virtualization product, Solid Independent Computing Environment, or Solid ICE. It's meant to be able to host thousands of either Windows or Linux desktops from central servers. One server can host both types of desktops. In addition, each user desktop may show a high degree of individualization.


Link

Comments

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

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...