Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

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...

I have covered MyBooo, iCloud and se veral other Cloud like OS, this gOS version too goes after the same model. But maybe we will eventually see the emergence of netbooks, where HP is doing a lot of work and shipping touch-screen like netbooks, with Cloud OS, fast-boot embedded Linux OS with a Browser like OS that will soon kill all those fat transitional versions we all call VDI etc. Regular PCs are definitely going to die and VDI's will be killed as Cloud OSs ill steal the thunder right under the noses of all the VDI vendors. When Google released the beta for its Chrome web browser in September, it it led to discussions about the idea that in the future, web applications could completely take the place of traditional applications. Computers would no longer need OSs as we now know them; they would only need to run a browser. A recent product announcement brought us a little closer to that future. In a press release Monday, Good OS announced a new OS called Cloud. According to the...

Given that HP ships 50M pcs worldwide annually. They might just give Microsoft a very hard time. Market is changing dramatically and its just about as devious around the detours. Why is all this happening: Globalization Middle-class rising/New consumers are joining Fat PC/Desktops are dying Thin, smaller units are emerging Cloud computing will go and grow massively as demand increases, money spreads across billions of wallets and as big enterprises freeze and consolidate, newer ones open. This is what I call the Great Jar'ing! Policy makers will have to ensure that this is regulated for fair trade. Generational shift is happening Back to the story of BusinessWeek: WEANING FROM WINDOWS? Still, the sources say employees in HP's PC division are exploring the possibility of building a mass-market operating system. HP's software would be based on Linux, the open-source operating system that is already widely available, but it would be simpler and easier for mainstream users, t...

Sun is pretty serious about this business. Would Sun be shipping a ESX-like (ep, we all know that xVM is not really taking off) version soon out of all the development experience out of VirtualBox? I know, its a bit too late or that but you just never know! Cloud Computing is coming and whether you like your own hypervisor there or not, desktop is definitely what Sun is poised for! This now adds the ability to run 64-bit OSes on a virtual machine, an improved GUI on OS X and paid support subscription for its customers. This new release comes only a few days after the release of the maintenance release 1.6.6 which already included some important fixes, like improved stability and performance on AMD CPUs that support AMD-V virtualisation, plus better SATA drivers, shared folders performance, improved support for recent Linux kernels, and some fixes for OS-X users as well. A full "change log" detailing the bugs fixed can be found over here . Available in 32-bit and 64-bit e...

This is bound to spark of a huge discussion. Does that also makes hypervisors inefficient for CloudApps? The hypervisors we tested from VMware (ESX 3.X), XenSource (Xen) and Microsoft's Virtual Server (not Hyper-V, which wasn't yet released) all prohibit the ability for the CPU/chip sets to reduce speed or go into "green mode" as long as there's a virtual machine guest running atop the hypervisor -- regardless of operating system flavor. Hypervisors allocate system resources as specified by administrative constraints imposed on virtual machine guest operating systems and applications. The action of actively monitoring and allocating specified resources generates a lot of work for the CPU. Hypervisor system clock ticks and resource controls, combined with host VM guest operating system ticks, simply prevent CPUs from resting and therefore saving power. Source

I have long waited to get VMware support for Mac OS X. Why? When I started out with the Oracle RAC series on VMware, I had a plan. Lately I am saving the world and have taken some distance from the articles ;-) I wanted to port RAC on all possible OSs. I got many like: Windows Linux Solaris now Mac OS X. Will RAC run on it? We'll find out soon, I don't promise you that it'll be ready tomorrow, but it'll be ready for sure. So it's good news to finally have those Apple things running as your VMs ;-)

This is probably more of a historical blogpost than the rest of what I blogged today. Get this masterpiece from MIT here . Maybe you can create a VM which can run this ancient beauty ;-)

Losing the operating system has several benefits. Many OS services are already duplicated by Java or the hypervisor, and BEA estimates that cutting the OS can reduce consumption of system resources such as memory and CPU cycles by 25% to 50%. It also simplifies management, as WLS-VE knows it's being virtualized and so can more easily map software processes to the hardware it's running on. Performance can improve, as a complete OS doesn't have to be loaded whenever a virtual machine is started. Still, though WLS-VE shipped in July, its Liquid Operations Control management system won't be available until December. Performance claims haven't yet been proved and will depend on using hardware with virtualization support baked in--without it, VMware simply takes the place of the OS. I have pesonally started a question in the LinkedIn Q&A, feel free to voice your opinions there, and original article is here .

If I read this slashdot post and see what the community is saying, I sometimes get the feeling that virtualization is pushing a bit too hard from all sides. The users are finally getting to run virtually any operating system on a virtual stack. Microsoft and Apple may be feeling threatened (for obvious reasons, I'm sure) but eventually they may have to give in to it. Bottom line is : Users are tired of being hardware bound . Virtualization has made that a lot easier. I just need one hardware and run several different OSs side by side. We all do, don't we?

LXer reporting... Hi, I am happy to announce the availability of EasyVZ, an OpenVZ management GUI under the GPL. EasyVZ makes it simple to create,destroy and manage Virtual Private Servers from within a cozy and comfortable graphical user interface. The EasyVZ client can manage the server from anywhere over the network, although, currently there is no authentication available Check out the project at SourceForge and ScreenShots . Read more...