Run OS Run...

The above title is a horrible attempt at a Forest Gump reference.

Either way - Novell announces support for VMWare's Virtual Machine Interface - which allows Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 Service Pack 2's kernel to have "increased performance and better interoperability".

Think of it this way - there will be preferred OS's to virtualize - Novell says you can virtualize Suse since its just x86 virtualization but if you do SLES 10SP2 - you can get VMI support.

In the paravirtualization space - this will mean increased density, better running VM's, better running ESX hosts, etc.

In other words - "the guest operating system is modified to work more closely with the underlying hardware and not just with the virtualized environment."

And its a brand differentiator as well - the OS and the VM platform both have to be tuned or tunable - and with VMI - VMWare is saying they are prepared to virtualize an OS like SUSE better than its competitors.

VMs can cost more than physical servers -- really!!

I am amazed how many virtual environments I have now seen that are severely under utilizing the new hardware and are afraid to increase VM density. They buy expensive server hardware, loaded it with 16Gigs or more for $30K to $50K and are running just a handful of VMs on it. This is analogous to driving a perfectly good Ferrari without ever getting out of first gear!! Say your are running 8 Vms on a $50K hardware. Add the cost of SANs, etc and you can quickly see how the cost of each VM can actually be higher than the physical server it replaced. This of course begs the question why do people underutilize the hardware?

As far as I can tell there are several reasons. Some are just being utilization "ignorant" about their environment, but the majority is simply afraid to "push the metal" and increase utilization because of concerns about running into ESX performance problems or worth yet -- downtime. Since finding capacity bottlenecks using Virtual Center is not trivial and time consuming, and predicting future capacity bottlenecks requires fairly advanced mathematical analysis of all core 4 resource types , disk I/O etc, most Vmware Admins lack the time and experience to do this exercise. So they keep the Ferrari in first gear, keep driving blindfolded, and hope that vm sprawl does not catch up with them. With availability of tools like the Vkernel Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer
VMware admins will gain visibility into current and future capacity problems and steer clear of performance issues. It heps driving with lights on!! Tell us what you think www.vkernel.com