VMware Everywhere from VMware VP Steve Herrod
VMware VP Steve Herrod on why our announcements about OEM shipments of ESX Server 3i are important. Link: VMware Everywhere from Virtually There: Steve Herrod's Blog.
A hardware-centric philosophy
VMware has always believed that virtualization should be integrated into hardware, always there to enable the computing resources’ full power and capabilities. This hardware-centric philosophy differs from other virtualization vendors that think of it as just another feature in a traditional (and large) operating system. For this critical layer of your datacenter, you should absolutely expect and receive the rock-solid reliability, security, and performance that you are used to from hardware. Expectations of modern operating systems are, shall we say, lower.
Size matters
Key to this vision is the new architecture that ESX Server 3i introduces. This architecture provides all the performance and reliability features of ESX Server in a small, 32MB footprint. This is 1/50th the size of a typical Windows or Linux OS deployment! ESX Server 3i is the only hypervisor that does not depend on a large, general purpose operating system to function. This small footprint reduces the amount of code that can have bugs in it, streamlines performance, and minimizes the interfaces and code “surface area” that are the target of security attacks. It is this new architecture that makes us confident that ESX Server 3i will be the most reliable, highest performance, and most secure virtualization platform around.
I had a hard time excerpting, because it's all good. Read the whole thing.
Jae Ellers is excited, especially for the ease of deployment to remote sites and branch offices. Link: Mister VM: ESX 3i Embedded Availability Imminent.
VMware ESX 3i Embedded will be available from at least 4 major vendors "real soon now". At least that's the word on the street. I've definitely heard similar things from my vendor contacts.
I'm very excited about this since it will be great to use in some of our regional sites. It's tough to get disparate hardware in and have to juggle configs around to get on that new hardware remotely. This should really smooth things out.
Updated:
- Mauricio Freitas thinks we're on a roll.
- More context and some quotes from Bridget Botelho at SearchServerVirtualization: Link: VMware ESX 3i server shipments imminent, HP, Dell say. Bridget quotes Andrew Kutz as not seeing the technical advantage of flash vs disk, but I think that's a red herring. Two of the real differentiators are 32MB vs a full OS attached to the hypervisor and the ease of deployment because it's all preconfigured and part of the hardware you just bought.
Posted by John Troyer on February 27, 2008 in VMworld Europe 2008
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To clarify what I told Bridget, my points WRT embedded hypervisors are as follows:
- They are a great marketing checkbox.
- ESX 3i does not possess a single feature that is not possible with 3.5.
- Anonymous servers are already possible with boot-from-SAN.
- OEM hardware with pre-installed OSs have been the norm for many years, all that 3i changes is the install medium (and some features that are exclusive to 3i only by the choice of VMware product managers and engineers)
3i and other embedded hypervisors are nice, but the only real advantage I see is the streamlined code base (and one could argue about that). The distribution and install method of VirtualIron where you simply have a management server that pushes out the hypervisor image to a server on boot is far more intriguing to me. I would much rather see OEM servers shipping with the network boot option selected as the primary choice, have the server find the VMware ESX image server via PXE boot, and then have the VMware ESX image server push the latest coy of 3i (since it is so small after all) to the server.
Now that would tickle my fancy like only number 6 or number 8 know how to do. Oh yeah, BSG fans know what I'm talkin' 'bout : )
Posted by: Andrew Kutz | February 27, 2008 at 03:21 PM
Oh, and I know for a fact that Dell (I am not sure about others, but likely) sold ESX 3 as a pre-installed OS option prior to 3i. So, you could *already* get ESX from the factory as it were. Sure, 3i includes some nice auto-config features, but those *could* have been a part of 3.5 if the right people had been so inclined.
I'm not hating on 3i. I think embedded is a natural evolution. And the small code base is certainly quite a technical accomplishment. I just do not think that it is the second coming like everyone is hailing it as. That said, I had my head-phones in, if Gabriel did his thing, I could have missed it.
Posted by: Andrew Kutz | February 27, 2008 at 03:27 PM