Recently vendors such as Weblogic and IBM have realised that running a virtual application machine on an (bloated) OS which is in turn running on a virtual hardware machine is just silly. I expect that we will soon see apps that run a lot closer to the base virtual machine (though they won’t know or care), cutting out lots of fat and overhead (you can run a slim linux VM with Java in less than 100MB).

Thus most of the heavy lifting will be in the VM hypervisor and its drivers, which will also manage the sharing with the applications.

I can also see DB VMs that cut most of the OS out (maybe part of why Oracle is so keen on Red Hat?) and again take on most of the storage smarts.

The hypervisor could then provide two interfaces, a file based one (like ZFS or Google) and an object based one like you have mentioned before.

3Leaf’s approach seems to be to efficiently run one app per (cheap) server but soon even a low-end server will be so powerful that you’ll need some kind of virtualization inside the box. At that point it becomes a fight between the OS and hypervisor vendors.

I also agree with Wes about Solaris (and perhaps AIX and even crusty old HP-UX as well; *certainly* VMS, though at this point, perhaps no one cares any more): there’s no lack of OSs that handle lots of processes (whether homogeneous or heterogeneous) just dandy – Windows just doesn’t happen to be one of them, and that’s the problem, since porting applications to a more competent OS appears to present more obstacles than simply virtualizing Windows systems such that each OS instance need support only a single application.

The other related point is that the old Unix paradigm of one process per client connection is pretty much passe: multi-threaded applications are common now virtually everywhere they are appropriate, which would eliminate a fair amount of the value of virtualizing servers if Windows itself were as reliably stable running such an app as some of the more mature OSs are (and thus didn’t need virtualizing to minimize the number of threads lost on a failure).

Some people believe that Windows really can come somewhere near matching the reliability of some of the other OSs I mentioned if properly configured. If so, then ‘proper configuration’ appears to be something that few Windows admins are able to achieve, creating much of the thriving virtualization market which we see today (the balance perhaps coming from economies in management that can accrue from managing only a single application per server rather than suitably configuring a single OS instance to protect multiple applications from each other).

- bill

So it’s cheaper to buy the 3Leaf gateway and an IB HCA for each server than to buy a FC HBA for each server? Or is the idea to spend money on IB switch ports and save money on Ethernet/FC switch ports? Maybe I could imagine that, since enterprisey switches are so expensive.

BTW, I think the OS that can handle lots of concurrent applications is supposed to be Solaris.

I hope they have an easy, low cost way to connect to storage…. this may take another round of VC funds.

It seems that the cost of the 10Gbit Ethernet proving to be as painful as the cost of FC ?.