Virtuozzo - O/S Virtualization Beats Entire System Virtualization?
Another post over at Madden's web site caught my eye, since I'm in the middle of writing a book for SWSoft on their Virtuozzo product. Brian discusses the idea of O/S Virtualization:
In the Virtuozzo world, you install your base OS just like normal. (This can be Windows or Linux, but for the purposes of this article, we'll focus on Windows.) Once Windows is installed, you install Virtuozzo just like a regular application. Then from within the Virtuozzo console, you create multiple virtualization environments (VEs). These VEs each act...
...as their own virtualized instances of Windows. They have their own IP addresses, their own security, and their own applications and configurations. But they're sharing the base OS instance. So when Microsoft releases an OS hotfix, you apply it once to the base OS instead of once to each VE instance. This OS Virtualization approach also gives you higher density than a HW virtualization solution since you're only running once Windows instance to be shared across all the VEs, instead of one per VE.
Of course OS Virtualization also has some downsides. The main one is that all VEs must be runing the same OS at the same hotfix / service pack / patch level. (Actually, some people list this as an advantage too.)
In doing research for this book (link to come soon) I'm really starting to like SWSoft's product. I think much of the problems with their product are lack of market recognition. They also still lack the hot migrate functionality that VMware has for their Windows version -- though it is available for the Linux O/S.
They tell me that this is soon to come, but won't make it into the 4.0 version to come out very soon. I think that that feature is what will leapfrog this product into the 1st tier.
In the rest of Brian's post he pontificates on hosted desktops and their feasibility on Virtuozzo. Whereas I think hosted desktops is a horrible idea with VMware, there's definitely some compelling arguments in the Virtuozzo space for doing it.
Check it out at:
http://www.brianmadden.com/content/article/Youve-heard-of-Hardware-Virtualization-and-Application-Virtualization-Lets-look-at-OS-Virtualization
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