VMware To Join OpenStack Foundation 41
hypnosec writes "OpenStack Foundation, backed by virtualization players like Rackspace, Red Hat and IBM, is going to get a unexpected new member – VMware. According to a post on the OpenStack Foundation Wiki, the agenda of the Board of Directors meeting on August 28 includes the Gold membership of VMware as one of the topics. VMware is not the only one applying for Gold membership as Intel and NEC are also standing in line for their memberships as well."
Political mess? (Score:2, Interesting)
Will VMWare donate their patents? (Score:3, Interesting)
VMWare's membership is a great opportunity to plant poison pills that can be later exploited to shut down any development originating from this partnership. I would hope Openstack has obtained usage rights in exchange for their membership.
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I dunno, do you reckon they're retards?
Look at the state of patents. Look at Apple just being gifted a billion dollars and change for "inventing" rectangles with rounded corners. Even those who rail against patents are busily engaged in stockpiling "defensive" ones.
So no, I'm guessing that no sane business will lay aside their patents, not until the rules of the game are changed.
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I 'reckon' VMWare is well aware of Apple, and as my question suggests last weeks court decision is in my mind as well. Unless VMWare offers indemnification to Openstack Foundation they are a fox in the hen house.
Openstack should secure usage rights in perpetuity, else VMWare can make strategic suggestions that steers development towards their patent portfolio. Years from now VMWare might decide the products of Openstack Foundation represent an obstacle to be eliminated.
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I think you're paranoid on a good day.
VMware is late to the party, and is getting their clock cleaned by the competition. This why they came to the table: to eat lunch, like the rest of them. VMware's roots are open source, although they charge dearly for their proprietary stuff. Nonetheless, the industry points towards stack-related tool kits that spin up hardware of near-legendary value. You don't think they don't want a piece of that pie? Loads of it's FOSS and loads of it's Ruby, Ajax, and stuff that al
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>> "I think you're paranoid on a good day."
Are you following me?
An interesting commentary (Score:4, Insightful)
An interesting and relevant commentary on OpenStack;
https://gist.github.com/3456841 [github.com]
Re:An interesting commentary (Score:5, Insightful)
He misses the point that in
How do you commercialize
the easiest way to commercialize is to hand hold and support and project manage.
Selling a proprietary virtualization empire is, in the long run, about as likely to succeed as writing a text editor, so going all "IBM" and moving into services might be a pretty wise move for vmware.
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Selling a proprietary virtualization empire is, in the long run, about as likely to succeed as writing a text editor
You mean like Microsoft Office, which at its core has a glorified text editor that is one of the cores of Microsoft's profitability? Or how about an OS (for anyone whos read "In the Beginning was the Command Line" [cryptonomicon.com])?
If VMware can keep up innovation, and can fix some of its licensing issues, I dont see why they could not have a long future in selling a "virtualization empire".
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It might also want to move the project towards something that will better integrated with its own virtualization management tools.
Now for being "good stewards", I would not hold my breath.
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Until a couple of years ago, they were the only ones with anything comparable to vMotion. They are among just one or two others these days with Storage motion (moving where the physical data for a VM is stored, while that VM is on). They are (AFAIK) currently the only ones with anything like DRS (dynamically migrating VMs between hosts based on load), and certainly the only ones with anything like DPM (dynamically consolidating VMs based on load to save power-- during non peak, migrate everything to one s
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Selling a proprietary virtualization empire is, in the long run, about as likely to succeed as writing a text editor
You mean like Microsoft Office, which at its core has a glorified text editor that is one of the cores of Microsoft's profitability?
Thanks that was Exactly my point. The market has space for one big text editor and maybe a couple "one man shop" specialized editors. And thats about it. Sucks to be word perfect or bank street writer or whatever. Not so bad if you're the one guy who won, but what are the odds.
On the other hand there are legions of contractor / consultant / educator / admin / author / designer types doing the "let me help you with MS Word", or pretty much any word processor, really, as long as you're willing to pay for
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Not so bad if you're the one guy who won, but what are the odds.
I mean, when you're VMWare and youve been at the top of the virtualization pack for over a decade now, Id be feeling pretty confident.
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Selling a proprietary virtualization empire is, in the long run, about as likely to succeed as writing a text editor
Point proven. Text editors being successfully embedded into damn near everything these days. Even my Universal TV remote. It's possible you pontificated precisely the words you submitted using some other technology, but Occam's razor points to you using a text editor instead...
Think of that fine fellow who was paid to implement the text editor in my universal remote. Why, after completing that task I bet the engineer went on to create other software, and got paid for making it too. One might even ag
Deceptive wording (Score:3)
Since when should VMware be associated with anything involving the word "open"? Its a closed source, proprietary product that takes away users freedom to be able to modify and understand what it is doing on their system. At least as a part of all of their licences, give users the access to source code under a non-redistribute licence.
Virtualbox is a much better choice, which I recommend supporting financially. You can trust developers more that is upfront and honest with its code, rather than hides it as if it has something to hide.
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You mean Virtualbox owned by Larry Ellison? I agree. Support Virtualbox because Ellison has never locked anybody in or abused his companies Market position.
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http://www.ohloh.net/p/virtualbox [ohloh.net]
Virtualbox OSE, the open soruce edition with GPL licensing.
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I pay for a small VMware cluster. On the download page, I can actually download all of the open source components used. Not just the client tools, but things like their data deduplication for their integrated backup. VMWare is actually a decent proponent of opens source, because its lack of licensing issues is what is making people go so crazy over virtualization. (spinning up 20 vm's to support a new project takes a few min with linux, and days with purchasing for windows ;))
Of course, they are like IB
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Enough competing hypervisors already!! (Score:1)
As a systems person, one of the hardest things right now is keeping up with who we think is going to win the hypervisor wars. Any sort of consolidation in my mind is a good thing. Right now, there's VM software available from:
- VMWare
- Citrix (XenServer)
- Oracle (VirtualBox)
- Red Hat (RHV)
- Microsoft (Hyper-V)
- Open source (Xen, LVM, etc.)
Plus, every server and network vendor (IBM, VCE, HP, etc.) is trying their hardest to push boxes built around one of these software stacks _plus_ a proprietary network vir
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What SHOULD happen, is all hypervisors defeated by OS-implemented host compartmentalization (LXC and similar).
Virtualization is great for development, testing and running craptastic operating systems that you really, really hate to run but can't get rid of (what means Windows for sane people).
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I do not think virtualization means what you think it means.
Virtualization = FULL emulation (e.g. VMWare, VirtualBox, XEN, Parallels)
Compartmentalization = compartmentalization of memory and permissions. (e.g. OpenVZ, *BSD jails, User-mode Linux, Kernel-mode Linux, etc)
I figured I'd let you know that since you seem to think that hypervisors should be defeated by compartmentalization...
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I do not think virtualization means what you think it means.
I can assure you, your thoughts have nothing to do with reality.
Virtualization = FULL emulation (e.g. VMWare, VirtualBox, XEN, Parallels)
And this technology has no place in OS design. It's a completely spurious level of indirection used as a crutch for broken operating systems. Last time it was legitimate, it was used on IBM mainframes to run nested instances of operating systems, because consistent kernel/userspace interface was not invented yet.
Basically, virtualization system's developer says: "I don't care what is at the level below hypervisor -- hardware must SERVE ME! I do
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Virtualization is NOT emulation.
Hardware emulation. Hardware emulates different hardware (in this case, set of processors with peripherals). OS design started from this, then the idea of virtual memory that uses model radically different from the hardware memory model, killed it. Similarly, time-sharing turned into scheduling based on state of processes and i/o operations (modern virtualization uses "cooperative" scheduling where OS still has something to say, however it's still clumsy), and storage partitioning was replaced with permissi
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OS compartmentalization doesn't help running different OSs on the same hardware
The only reason for running multiple OSes on the same hardware is some software being sabotaged to not run on OS where everything else runs. There is no benefit in encouraging this kind of behavior.
and I don't know of any implementations that allow for live migration between physical hosts
It's such a rarely needed capability, no one bothered implementing it since Condor [wisc.edu] (that exists, but no one uses it). Any infrastructure for state persistency on the application level serves the same putpose better and provide other benefits unachievable by a simple checkpointing/transfer. However if it was neces
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One of the things openstack has been doing, is to abstract away the hypervisor. I believe you can manage VM's whether they are running KVM, ZEN, Amazon EC2, and vmware. Which means you can drop one, and move to the other, and still keep all your same tools to manage the machines, storage, etc, and just change or deploy new hosts. (which is big, but not as big as also re-writing all your tools for provisioning and such)
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If you are doing it right it does not matter what you pick, at the end of the day these are nothing more than environments in which to run virtualized instances. If you have a good deployment model then the environment in which it runs means little.
I know at least in my shop we could potentially switch from one to the other nearly overnight.
VMWare are already there, you just didn't notice (Score:1)
Check out Cloud Foundry (http://cloudfoundry.com). A VMWare creation which is completely open, and non-proprietary, and is open sourced on github.
VMWare also recently bought SpringSource, the biggest Open Source company in the Java landscape. So yeah, VMWare are actually all for the open source movement.