Pact to Provide Uniform Virtualization for Linux
Finally, both VMWare and the Xen have agree to a single strategy and interface for providing virtualization on the Linux Kernel. This is after an open source symposium held in Ottawa, Canada last July. InformationWeek carries this story.
Their original disagreement has been displaced by a commitment to work on a solution together, says Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource, the company that builds products around Xen virtualization software. The two are trying to come up with a common approach to virtualization support in the Linux kernel. This technology will also virtual machines created on one hypervisor platform to work on another hypervisor platform.
“With the help of IBM, we made a technology breakthrough that accommodates both,” Crosby said in an interview Thursday. The two companies sat down together to work through the problem during the recent Linux Symposium, held in late July in Ottawa, Canada. Jack Lo, VMware’s senior director of R&D, agrees. A group got together at the Symposium “to put together an interface to the Linux kernel. There’s been a lot of activity” to reach agreement, he said.
It is interesting to note that IBM’s support principally comes in the form of IBM employed Linux kernel developers like Rusty Russell who have come up with a strategy for providing a uniform interface for both VMWare ESX and Xen hypervisors. Russell’s idea is called Paravirt_Ops, or paravirtual operations.
It is interesting to note that part of the people pressuring for collaboration on Linux standardized virtualization is Oracle. Maybe the next generation Oracle database RAC systems will be using virtualization technology? New Oracle clustering technology. Interesting…
So the future of virtualization is the ability to move your virtual machines from one hypervisor to another irregardless of what operating system and hypervisor technology is being used. Some interesting scenarios are hot VM transfers and online/offline VMs on multiple hypervisor technologies.
