InformationWeek’s reporter Antone Gonsalves and Computerworld’s Robert Mullins commented on Mendel Rosenblum’s closing keynote at the LinuxWorld Conference. He is chief scientist and co-founder of virtualization vendor VMware.
In a nutshell, he says that today’s operating systems are too bloated and too complex to maintain. I think we can all agree to that. So the future could hold stripped down OS’es like a stripped down Linux kernel and only the software really needed to run one specific app.
This would then be deployed on one or more machines, that expose their hardware trough a hypervisor (virtualization layer). In this manner, the app thinks it is running on one machine, while in reality a whole array of machines is serving the app.
On this “cluster cloud” a lot of apps could run, each in their own stripped os. This simplifies things a lot and benefits security tremendously.
I’ve been using virualized servers for about a year now and I must say that they rock! If I want a new server, I prepare the whole machine on my laptop and than just FTP it to my server cluster. I “mount” the new virtual server and presto. It just runs!
I find almost no performance impact on the performance, indeed performance is better because I use more than one machine.
If one machine fails, no one ever notices. I just replace it with new hardware and inform the cluster of a new member. That’s it!
