Virtualization and Grid Computing

I noticed this blog entry on ZDNet, Virtualization begins to haunt hardware makers, that guesses what you might expect: the current wave of companies consolidating via virtualization is what’s been eating into hardware sales.

Yet Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun) recently took the position that:

if you can double server utilization via Solaris Containers or VMWare [sic], people don’t buy fewer computers - they buy more. The value of innovation, at least to our core customers, is growing so fast that if the price declines, the overall return (value/price) goes through the roof - encouraging a feedback loop.

Could it be that Schwartz is still right but we’ll just first see a noticeable dip (”correction”) this year as most people merely consolidate instead of buying more hardware?

Open source VMs (and their accompanying management infrastructure) are eventually going to be just another standard part of the datacenter toolbox. It seems that value/price would stabilize and people would get used to it; this “feedback loop” can’t feed off itself forever.

Another major shift looks possible: the datacenter could see big power savings in the next decade. The this 80 core processor that Ian Foster pointed out “uses less energy than a quad-core processor and has teraflop performance capabilities.” The ability to sleep and awake cores as demand changes (and the ability to migrate computations away from cores that are getting too hot) results in huge power savings. Sounds like a mini virtual cluster on a chip.

IBM’s developerWorks has a new article that covers the basics of the many virtualization options for Linux:

Virtual Linux: An overview of virtualization methods, architectures, and implementations

“This article explores the ideas behind virtualization and then discusses some of the many ways to implement virtualization. We also look at some of the other virtualization technologies out there, such as operating system virtualization on Linux.”

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-linuxvirt/index.html

This is old news, but I wanted to remind you that there is a counter argument to the blue pill “100% undetectable malware” prototype that generated a lot of press this year:

http://www.virtualization.info/2006/08/debunking-blue-pill-myth.html

http://x86vmm.blogspot.com/2006/08/blue-pill-is-quasi-illiterate.html

Also, since malware requires an attack vector in the first place: if you don’t have extreme performance requirements, consider putting all network facing services in VMs (my websites are, save one SSH port on a dedicated IP). This should eliminate the ability for a blue pill/subvirt style attack to take hold in the first place (unless there’s an egregious networking stack issue in the VMM (if the VMM is even involved in networking which is not always the case)).

I hope that network facing VMs for the desktop become commonplace which will happen en masse when Microsoft likes the idea I guess (and makes it transparent to the user). Boot from a saved, clean slate every session; perhaps with versioned, non-executable storage shared between host and guest VM for user data updates.

Here is a ready to go web browsing virtual appliance from VMware and another one from rPath.