Sun Bare Metal Hypervisors Now GPLv3 154
ruphus13 writes with some more news for people foretelling the death of VMware. Sun has open sourced their xVM server, their bare-metal hypervisor virtualization solution. What used to once be the cash cow for VMware is now coming under increased threat, and Sun is once again turning to the Open Source community as a weapon. "Sun xVM Server is an outgrowth of the Xen project — which raises the question of why a company would go with Sun's version rather than the Xen one. Apart from its support for SPARC and Solaris (as well as other chips and operating systems), Sun is also building a services and sales organization around a commercial version of xVM server... If you want to kick the tires or cut your costs, you can hop over to xVMServer.org, download the source (GPL 3) and join the community. But Sun is betting that, as deployments move from an initial testing phase to active usage, large organizations will be willing to pay for guaranteed support (starting at $500 per year per physical server)."
cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
Slightly OT , but can someone explain... (Score:5, Insightful)
... why a VM has to "support" a given OS such as Vista or Solaris or Linux?
FTA: "Apart from its support for SPARC and Solaris..."
Surely if these VMs truly are PCs emulated in software with standard emulated devices then surely any OS than runs on the PC architecture and has drivers for these devices will install and run on these VMs regardless?
xVM is based on Xen... (Score:3, Insightful)
Which has a boatload of problems. The fact is there is enough competition in the market that just being able to be a hypervisor is not enough - you need to measure up and offer proprietary advantages.
The reason this release is not a big deal is that VMWare spanks the performance of every other hypervisor. VMWare ESX networking is magnitudes ahead of every single other competitor in the benchmarks.
Xen, KVM, etc. have existsed for a while now (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
> Xen is a paravirtualization technology, whereas VMWare is a straight-up virtualization technology.
That may have been true at some point. But, Xen has long ago supported full hardware virtualization (allowing it to run an unmodified OS, such as Windows). And, VMware now supports paravirtualization via "VMI" which they got included in the standard Linux kernel.
In any case, the more important issue is their management capabilities. Xen has struggled in the past because its management was weak compared to VMware. If Sun can put their resources into improving the management side of things, they could make an impact.
Those are restrictions??? (Score:3, Insightful)
-IDE drives are not supported as in who uses them in a real server anyway??
-NFS/TCP/IP/ethernet remote storage * CIFS remote storage -- as in that's not enough??
-NICS supporting the Solaris GLDv3 driver specification-- fine
-only MTUs of 1500 bytes are supported (when did you see one smaller recently??)
- Windows Server 2008 logo certified hardware-- that's about all of the servers I know, sadly.
Sun may thwart this one, too, but I'll give them a fighting chance. The model's somewhat sound but I'm eager to see the perf numbers and the real availability costs.
Re:cheap - Bad statistics would lie if they could (Score:1, Insightful)
Just a note, you won't ever see unfavorable benchmarks to VMWware, because they explicitly forbid publishing benchmarks without their authorization. Some time back (maybe a couple years now) VMWare published very biased results showing that (well Optimized) VMWare outperformed (Completely unoptimized) Xen. Xen shot back with Apples to Apples numbers where they showed that in a few special cases they were more less equal, but everywhere else Xen killed in the benchmarks. VMWare promptly threatened suit and pointed to their EULA which effectively says: Use of our product guarantees your agreement that you will not publish any comparisons with other products without our consent.
If you want to find the comparisions, google for "xen vs vmware benchmarks redacted" and see if you can find a copy of the unedited results.
Re:ZFS (Score:3, Insightful)
If they only wanted to play nice with the biggest community, all others be damned, they'd have just ported it to Windows
They're called Jumbo Frames, Jimbo (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody wants smaller MTUs, but with 1 and 10 gigabit ethernet, they sure as hell want larger ones.
Linus' licencing inflexibility will hurt us all (Score:4, Insightful)
Still, that's not much of an excuse. Also worth noting that even if ZFS was GPL3 (Sun prefers GPL3 over 2, it seems), then that would still not be good enough for Linux. So yes, this is where Linus' choice of license is giving us some problems. Overall it was a good choice, but this is the bad part.
It was foolish and short-sighted for Linus to release Linux under the GPL v2 only, and not GPL v2 or later, as recommended by the Free Software Foundation. Now it is virtually (no pun intended) impossible to relicense the kernel under another license (the missing "or later" part), as there have been far too many contributors, some of whom are dead, in prison, or have otherwise vanished from the Community.
Sun prefers GPL v 3 as it does a better job of keeping the code free, particularly with respect to software patents, which, while not a problem for those of us lucky enough to be in Europe (not a problem for the moment, anyway), are certainly a concern in the US and other nations the US has bullied into adopting similar legislation.
As a result, technologies like ZFS are unlikely to ever make it into the Linux kernel. In the coming decades, as more and more technologies come along like this, Linus' inflexible licensing choice is likely to relegate the kernel to a historical footnote, where other kernels, licensed under either the "or later" clause (or other more permissive licenses) will continue. It's a pity, and I say that as one who has been using Linux since 1993, and will continue using it for the foreseeable future.
Re:cheap - Bad statistics would lie if they could (Score:5, Insightful)
So... disclaimer. I'm a VMware employee, so I do know all about both these benchmarks (even if I had nothing to do with them). Agree the first VMware benchmark was quite skewed, looking at Xen instead of XenSource. The XenSource benchmark showed up, it showed Xen ahead in system-call microbenchmarks (hardware virtualization does well there, but lots of system calls with no I/O isn't representative of the real world) and more or less even on everything else. VMware approved XenSource's whitepaper for publication about two weeks later (which, BTW, is no longer on Citrix's website and not visible on Google). The comparison was not apples-to-apples - XenSource switched from Xen 3.0 to Xen 3.2 in the comparison, and didn't make any software-virtualization/hardware-virtualization tweaks. In other words, XenSource's benchmark was just as skewed as VMware's. And everybody who knows anything about benchmarking knows it.
The summary of that whole mess: XenSource / Simon Crosby got more PR mileage out of making a big deal of EULA restrictions than from any actual performance comparison. They never cared about a performance comparison - it was all a PR stunt to get a great big /REDACTED/ document posted to news sites / blogs.
VMware does not forbid negative benchmarks; they do forbid stupid benchmarks. Usually, some amateur runs Passmark 2D, which is a system-call microbenchmark that doesn't even keep time correctly in a virtual machine. Every single person complaining about that EULA has never bothered submitting results - almost all submissions get approved.
Re:cheap - Bad statistics would lie if they could (Score:3, Insightful)
The summary of that whole mess: XenSource / Simon Crosby got more PR mileage out of making a big deal of EULA restrictions than from any actual performance comparison.
Wouldn't it be in vmware's best interest to get rid of the idiotic EULA restrictions then? Trying to shut people up makes you look bad. Letting people publish stupid benchmarks and then demonstrating how they're stupid makes them look bad. Openness is always the answer. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. Censorship just makes you look like you have something to hide.
Re:cheap - Bad statistics would lie if they could (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't take it as a flaimbait, but when VMWare itself will "keep time correctly" in the guest with respect to the host? No other VM/virtualization software I've used so far exhibits this strange "clock skew" behavior.
Re:ZFS (Score:2, Insightful)
It's ironic that the GPL is supposed to provide users with freedom, yet you cannot even mix GPL code with other "incompatible" free licenses. Maybe it's a good thing that ZFS was released under a license that is truly free and actually enabling rather than restrictive...
Re:cheap - Bad statistics would lie if they could (Score:3, Insightful)
The summary of that whole mess: XenSource / Simon Crosby got more PR mileage out of making a big deal of EULA restrictions than from any actual performance comparison.
So why not remove the stupid EULA restriction?
Hatta already made the point, but it is worth repeating. This is really the same issue that Lessig's Change Congress movement is about - it doesn't matter whether cash contributions skews the political process or not, the mere existence of contributions is sufficient to cast doubt on the neutrality of the political process in the mind of the populace.
It does not matter whether the EULA restriction is used only to stop stupid benchmarks, the mere existence of the restriction creates the impression that vmware has something to hide.