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Owning VirtualBox virtualization software is a great reason for IBM to buy Sun. IBM is trying to be a major player in the cloud computing space, but it relies o

by osipov 18y ago

Owning VirtualBox virtualization software is a great reason for IBM to buy Sun. IBM is trying to be a major player in the cloud computing space, but it relies on Xen and VMWare for x86 virtualization technology. IBM doesn't have much influence on Xen and its open source development community. Obviously IBM has even less influence over VMWare. So buying a solid x86 virtualization stack like VirtualBox would make IBM a serious contender for cloud computing deployments built from commodity x86 boxes.

greyboy 18y ago
Solaris also has zones, which has been tremendously powerful for our customers.
- tptacek 18y ago
  I suspect you could have made Xen (on the high end) or Jails (on the low end) equally as powerful. I'm not a fan of Zones, and of all the Solaris innovations of the past couple years, I think Zones have the least staying power.
  - patrickg-zill 18y ago
    Yes, you have made your bias very clear on Zones here on HN every time the subject has come up. Clearly they don't work well for you. However, people do use Zones and they clearly do work well. I suppose you have figured out how to use a jail to limit memory and CPU resources of the programs running in a jail? Ooops, that is a zone-only feature; like the time I set up Oracle in a zone and limited it to using no more than 4GB RAM .
    - tptacek 18y ago
      On the high end, I'd use Xen, like all the major large-scale hosting providers do. On the low end, I wouldn't bother trying to do fine grained resource control. It's not exactly insightful to point out my bias against Zones in a response to a comment where I basically say "I'm biased against Zones". I am indeed biased. And I can defend my argument that, as a technological approach, trying to compartmentalize all the kernel namespaces and building ad hoc group-level rlimits is a dead end. For what it's worth, just as your bias in favor of Zones (which I don't fault you for) is based on professional experience, so too is my bias against them.
    - nailer 18y ago
      Why wouldn't you just set user limits to limit Oracle memory use? You don't need zones for that.
wmf 18y ago
IMO VirtualBox is the worst virtualization tech available today (that's not to say that it's bad, just that the others are better); they just added 64-bit support recently and I don't know if they even have SMP guests yet. You probably shouldn't even ask about SR-IOV. IBM already has KVM.

by osipov 18y ago

greyboy 18y ago

Solaris also has zones, which has been tremendously powerful for our customers.

tptacek 18y ago
I suspect you could have made Xen (on the high end) or Jails (on the low end) equally as powerful. I'm not a fan of Zones, and of all the Solaris innovations of the past couple years, I think Zones have the least staying power.
- patrickg-zill 18y ago
  Yes, you have made your bias very clear on Zones here on HN every time the subject has come up. Clearly they don't work well for you. However, people do use Zones and they clearly do work well. I suppose you have figured out how to use a jail to limit memory and CPU resources of the programs running in a jail? Ooops, that is a zone-only feature; like the time I set up Oracle in a zone and limited it to using no more than 4GB RAM .
  - tptacek 18y ago
    On the high end, I'd use Xen, like all the major large-scale hosting providers do. On the low end, I wouldn't bother trying to do fine grained resource control. It's not exactly insightful to point out my bias against Zones in a response to a comment where I basically say "I'm biased against Zones". I am indeed biased. And I can defend my argument that, as a technological approach, trying to compartmentalize all the kernel namespaces and building ad hoc group-level rlimits is a dead end. For what it's worth, just as your bias in favor of Zones (which I don't fault you for) is based on professional experience, so too is my bias against them.
  - nailer 18y ago
    Why wouldn't you just set user limits to limit Oracle memory use? You don't need zones for that.

wmf 18y ago

IMO VirtualBox is the worst virtualization tech available today (that's not to say that it's bad, just that the others are better); they just added 64-bit support recently and I don't know if they even have SMP guests yet. You probably shouldn't even ask about SR-IOV. IBM already has KVM.