Skip to main content

KVM: Real threat to VMware/Xen, says Industry insider

Ok so all those whisperings were getting ouder and louder in my head and I had to just let it out. The video is by Greg Hartman and my industry insider friend, who wishes anonymity, had some pointers:



Featured opinion from an industry insider/researcher (This individual has no affiliation to VMware, Citrix , Microsoft or whoever):

o The rate-of-change has gone up significantly, and
fairly uniformly across all parts of the kernel
(core, arch-specific, device drivers, networking, etc).
It's greater than any other software project on Earth.
It's also broaden out (flattened), with lots of changes
coming from a broader set of people.

o KVM will win out over the Xen/VMware models. KVM uses Linux
as the hypervisor, whereas Xen needs to recreate its
own NUMA model, scheduling, memory management,
power management, and needs to use Linux for drivers.
KVM gets all these things for free from Linux (Qumranet's
opinion also). Combined with the rate of change and
massive amount of contributions to Linux, he thinks
Xen can not keep up. Also, newer real-time features
in Linux give real-time scheduling between VMs. AFAIK,
VMware doesn't have anything in the area of real-time
VMs scheduling.

o The Enterprise Linux model is broken. Stale out-of-date
Linux kernels are untenable to maintain, because new hardware
support in new kernels often drives architectural changes,
which are really difficult to back-port. He thinks Enterprise
Linux should also use newer kernels.
Feel free to comment on it.
Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousTue Jul 08, 03:17:00 PM GMT+2

    The video is not available anymore.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousThu Jul 10, 06:30:00 PM GMT+2

    Probably worth mentioning Greg KH works for SUSE/Novell.

    What's gonna be the impact on SUSE's virtualization strategy? Will they really drop Xen for KVM after those huge investments?

    ReplyDelete

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

Virtualization: GlassHouse hopes to cash in with its IPO!

GlassHouse Technologies Inc. on Tuesday registered to raise as much as $100 million in an initial public offering that, despite the company's financial losses, could prove a hit with investors drawn to its focus on "virtualization" technology. The Framingham, Mass., company offers consulting services for companies that use virtualization software to improve the performance of corporate servers and cut costs in their data centers. GlassHouse also provides Internet-based data storage. "Software-as-a-service," or SaaS, companies and vendors of virtualization products have proved popular among investors in recent years as corporate customers seek alternatives to conventional packaged software. GlassHouse, with roots in both sectors, will test the strength of that interest, said Peter Falvey, managing director with Boston investment bank Revolution Partners. "It will be a bit of a bell weather," he says. "It's not as though it's the 15th SaaS m...
Post a Comment
Read more