VMTN Blog

Background reading for today's opening keynote at VMworld. There will be no quiz following the session, but there is a tectonic shift going on in IT -- it pays to pay attention.

Overview page: Freedom

There is a significant change underway in systems infrastructure. The traditional infrastructure model of a single monolithic system running a single, monolithic OS and a single application at wastefully low levels of utilization is obsolete.

Karthik Rau: Changing Role of the OS

As the market for virtualization rapidly evolves over these next few years, customers need to ask themselves the following key question: Is it really simpler to have virtualization integrated into the OS and follow the same pattern of lock-in that has dominated the past 20 years of computing, or do I want a world where I have choice and can focus on running a best-of-breed technology stack for each of my applications?

Raghu Raghuram: Hypervisors, Operating Systems and Virtual Infrastructure

With virtualization, there is now an opportunity to implement security, availability and reliability outside the OS, through the virtualization layer. Implementing these services outside the OS delivers significant benefits.  First, the implementation is global in scope - independent of any OS or any application. Second, implementing these capabilities once at the virtualization layer benefits every guest OS and application on every VM. You no longer have to implement and manage agents or software for availability or security or system protection per application. Third, since the implementation is not dependent on the OS, it is inherently less susceptible to attacks on the OS and therefore leads to a simpler, more robust infrastructure.

Dan Chu: Virtualization and Licensing: What Customers Need

Vendors can evolve their licensing to allow customers to take advantage of new technology, or conversely vendors can hold back and seek to inhibit and restrict how customers can use new technology because they feel threatened by it.  Customers have adopted virtualization broadly and made it mainstream, and have been able to drive some significant changes and improvements in licensing and openness.  However, there are also a growing number of areas where specific vendors (Microsoft in particular) are threatening to use licensing to restrict and undercut the benefits that customers and the industry are gaining from virtualization.

Steve Herrod: Virtualization: Open Standards, Interfaces, and Formats

For virtual appliances to achieve their full potential, openness in virtual machine-related interfaces is critical. The real promise is "any software on any virtualization layer". We believe customers should be able to choose and/or purchase a virtual machine consisting of any application running on any operating system and then run it on their virtualization layer of choice.