ROM-based Hypervisors: The New Data Center Operating System
Write down September 11, 2007 on your calendar as a landmark day for virtualization. At VMWorld on Tuesday, several Independent Hardware Vendors (IHVs) announced their plans to support ESX3i -- VMWare's newest 32MB hypervisor -- within a bootable ROM on server hardware platforms. Announcements from Dell, IBM, HP, Fujitsu Siemens, and NEC rocked the stage during Diane Green's keynote address. (Sun was conspicuously missing -- another topic for another post).
You may say, OK Drue, nice announcement, but what does this mean for the industry? Plenty. By shipping the hypervisor on bootable flash within the server, it fundamentally changes the way we buy applications, operating systems and hardware platforms. In this scenario, the hypervisor becomes the operating system, while traditional operating systems become application run-time environments. Thus, in the future, we won't buy servers with traditional OSes pre-installed on the hardware platform. Customers will buy servers that are virtualization-ready, customizing their purchase with wide variety of pre-configured VHDs that bundle the application and the operating system as a solution. You may hear these bundles called "application blades", "software blades" or "virtual appliances". Whatever you call them, they represent a new way IHVs will deliver OSV and ISV solutions. And this scenario doesn't apply to just VMWare, based on XenSource's announcement of XenExpress OEM Edition, support for XenSource may not be far behind VMWare (something to watch for in the near future). No doubt Microsoft will use their leverage with the IHV to do the same with Viridian when ready.
When virtualization first appeared on the scene, many people predicted the demise of both the IHV and Operating System Vendor (OSV) market. But as we can see now, there is no need to feel sorry for these vendors. Virtualization has been a boon for OSVs. The ease at which administrators can spawn new virtual machines only increases the number of operating system licenses -- multiple fold. And while virtualization has sparked a wave of consolidation of server hardware, the IHVs have responded by building beefier virtualization-ready machines with greater profit margins. Now, because of ROM-based hypervisors, IHVs have enabled a platform to sell multiple (profit margin rich) solutions per HW platform.
Even better, using this model the customer can use the IHV as an image repository by sending custom VHD images used for server population before delivery. This opens a whole new world of services the IHV can offer to the customer...everything from data and image warehousing, to image and patch management, to disaster recovery.
And, let's not forget about desktops. Although not on any IHV radar at the moment, you have to believe ROM-based hypervisor boot of desktops not far behind. Imagine a world where your desktop boots a hypervisor, loads a small network stack and runs a small application that uses the network (or internet) to present to the end-user a list of VHDs to boot as a guest OS.
[posted by: Drue Reeves]
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