Events
VMworld Preview: VMware's Vision of Virtualization as the OS
- By John K. Waters
- 09/15/08
The annual VMworld user conference gets underway today in Las Vegas, with the event's host betting big on a new strategy that redefines its market-leading virtualization management products. VMware is set to unveil plans to expand its flagship virtualization platform into something resembling an operating system, a new cloud computing initiative and the company's path toward a "universal client vision."
The big announcement is the company's new Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS), which expands VMware's Infrastructure product into a new category, commented Bogomil Balansky, VMware's senior director of product marketing, in a pre-conference interview. "The VDC-OS is to the entire datacenter what Windows and Linux are to the individual server," he said.
VDC-OS aggregates all of the hardware in the datacenter -- the server, storage and network components -- into a single, logical resource pool, Balansky explained. And it comes with built-in services for availability, security and scalability.
"I like comparing this with Just-in-Time (JIT) production in manufacturing," he said. "That model is all about using only the right resources at the right time and being very efficient to build high-quality products very quickly and efficiently. This is what VDC-OS is doing on the hardware side. It's taking the different pieces of the datacenter and assembling them into a single big resource and making it available in a very efficient manner to all applications."
How does all this turn a virtualization platform into an OS?
"An operating system does fundamentally two things," Balansky said. "It manages the hardware, and it provides services to applications. This is exactly what this platform does. It manages the hardware by aggregating it and using it in the most efficient way, and it provides services to applications in a new way. But in this case, it's for the entire datacenter, not just the server."
Among those services are VMware Fault Tolerance, through which the company promises zero downtime; a data recovery tool; VMsafe, which provides "X-ray vision" into the virtual machines for virus and malware detection; and a "hot-add" feature, which allows users to add more CPU, memory and network resources to the virtual machine on the fly.