VMware virtual appliance a threat to the OS

By Robert Mullins, IDG News Service, 08/09/07

The virtual appliance model could be a major threat to operating systems from major vendors such as Microsoft, says a cofounder of VMWare.

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Mendel Rosenblum told an audience at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco Thursday that a virtual appliance, which bundles a software application with only the operating system code needed to make it run, can then be deployed on a virtualized server regardless of the host operating system. Rosenblum is also chief scientist of virtualization at VMware.

Asked if he thinks the virtual appliance model is a threat to OS vendors, principally Microsoft, Rosenblum said, "If I were in their shoes ... I think the answer is yes."

The virtual appliance bundle is similar to the software appliance, but is specifically designed to run on a virtualized server.

A virtualization "hypervisor," like VMware's, separates the server hardware from the OS and the rest of the software stack. The hypervisor creates multiple logical servers within one physical server, allowing it to run multiple applications, thus using more of the server's capacity.

Rosenblum sees the virtual appliance as an alternative to making applications fit ever larger and more complex operating systems, simplifying the software writing process by taking out parts of the OS not needed to run that application, or even creating a customized OS.

"What I consider predictive [of the threat] is their complexity," he said. "They've built this OS to the point that they basically have no choice but to actually go and put in a hypervisor. All the OS vendors want to own the hardware connection, but I see there is going to be a big battle over who gets control over the hardware."

The open-source Linux OS is "well positioned to be the OS of choice" for a virtual appliance, said Rosenblum, because its licensing model is very friendly to this type of use. A software developer can bundle the software with parts of Linux easily, while commercial OS vendors like Microsoft would "look askance" at something like that.

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The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

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RE: VMware virtual appliance a threat to the OS By Anonymous on August 10, 2007, 3:32 pm Reply | Read entire comment Well VMware was one of the first companies to ship a commercial product for Linux, back in 1998. Their first product was for Linux. MS Windows hosted solutions came...

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