3 ms·

I for one, really dislike this drive towards VMs for everything. VMs are mostly about solving the same problems that operating systems were there to solve in t

I for one, really dislike this drive towards VMs for everything. VMs are mostly about solving the same problems that operating systems were there to solve in the first place, only slower. I personally think that part of the problem is the way software is installed and configured by modern package managers and distributions. It makes people see the installed software as part of the operating system almost. If you want two webservers with different configurations you therefore need two operating systems. The concept for creating a couple of different users and running the software out of each one seems foreign to modern system admin these days.

arethuza 13y ago
One additional reason for the popularity of VMs in enterprise environments is that software vendors will often refuse to support applications on servers that have other applications installed. Supporting high-availability of guest servers by allowing "live" migration from one host to another is pretty cool as well - either for fail-over or to allow hardware maintenance. The default position these days in enterprise environments seems to be that a server will be a VM unless you have a really strong case for having dedicated hardware (and that only ever seem to apply for database clusters).
roarroar 13y ago
The sole reason for Xen etc is that people were too lazy to do microkernels in the first place. It is exactly the same thing as we are seeing in the web browser with all the low level primitives like asm.js and WebGL: the good ideas inevitably start to creep back in (even if in a crap, watered-down form at first) given enough time. In fact, we could easily have proper MMU sandboxing in the browser by now if we were running proper microkernels. Instead we'll pay big performance and complexity overheads to do it in userspace.
vidarh 13y ago
Just creating a couple of different users does not give nearly the level of isolation a VM does.

arethuza 13y ago

One additional reason for the popularity of VMs in enterprise environments is that software vendors will often refuse to support applications on servers that have other applications installed. Supporting high-availability of guest servers by allowing "live" migration from one host to another is pretty cool as well - either for fail-over or to allow hardware maintenance. The default position these days in enterprise environments seems to be that a server will be a VM unless you have a really strong case for having dedicated hardware (and that only ever seem to apply for database clusters).

roarroar 13y ago

The sole reason for Xen etc is that people were too lazy to do microkernels in the first place. It is exactly the same thing as we are seeing in the web browser with all the low level primitives like asm.js and WebGL: the good ideas inevitably start to creep back in (even if in a crap, watered-down form at first) given enough time. In fact, we could easily have proper MMU sandboxing in the browser by now if we were running proper microkernels. Instead we'll pay big performance and complexity overheads to do it in userspace.

vidarh 13y ago

Just creating a couple of different users does not give nearly the level of isolation a VM does.