• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Virtualization.com

Virtualization.com

News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

  • News
  • Featured
  • Partnerships
  • People
  • Acquisitions
  • Guest Posts
  • Interviews
  • Videos
  • Funding

CopyCats in Virtualization

November 13, 2009 by Kris Buytaert 3 Comments

Step back in time with me a couple of years, Xen was starting it’s upmars and with Xen paravirtualization became popular , then came the other Virtualization vendors and the discussion about which technology was best discussed started.

Now we all know that VMWare and Xensource were discussing how to include hooks for Paravirtualization into the Linux kernel and eventually that also happened,however there wasn’t really any adoption , a couple of weeks ago VMWare announced it was going to drop support for paravirtualization. Aparrently VMWare’s Paravirtualization story wasn’t really a success.

The Xen folks pioneered with Paravirtualization and a dedicated hypervisor, yet somehow also got interrested in running the Xen engine within an already existing operating system by means of a kernel module. That way Xen can also be run on different existing platforms just as KVM and Virtualbox, one of the big reasons for KVM adoption exactly is the fact that one can turn an existing Linux machine into a virtual machine host by doing a simple modprobe

However the initial development focus for Hosted Xen was Windows and OS/X
not really a market wher Open Source Virtualization tools are going to make big
adoption steps fast

So you might wonder who is using this Hosted Xen anyhow , apparently not that many people. On the other side there’s VMWare’s ParaVirt similar story
And who’s using ParaVirt ? Aparently nobody …as there used to be a huge performance bug in it for over a year ..

So the lesson learned ? Stick with your own mainline technology .. no need to
copy the others ideas, seems like they won’t be a success anyhow ..

Filed Under: Guest Posts

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Peter Novodvorsky says

    November 14, 2009 at 3:17 am

    VMWare uses paravirtualization and I hope is going to use it further. They are dropping some parts of VMI support, however I hope they will keep support for vmxnet and other paravirtual devices which appeared to be a huge success to vmware.

    Reply
  2. Kris Buytaert says

    November 15, 2009 at 7:41 pm

    @Peter:

    There is a difference between Paravirtualized drivers/devices and a fully Paravirtualized guest

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Kris Buytaert (krisbuytaert) 's status on Friday, 13-Nov-09 21:40:52 UTC - Identi.ca says:
    November 13, 2009 at 11:41 pm

    […] https://virtualization.com/guest-posts/2009/11/13/copycats-in-virtualization/ a few seconds ago from mbpidgin […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Tags

acquisition application virtualization Cisco citrix Citrix Systems citrix xenserver cloud computing Dell desktop virtualization EMC financing Funding Hewlett Packard HP Hyper-V IBM industry moves intel interview kvm linux microsoft Microsoft Hyper-V Novell oracle Parallels red hat research server virtualization sun sun microsystems VDI video virtual desktop Virtual Iron virtualisation virtualization vmware VMware ESX VMWorld VMWorld 2008 VMWorld Europe 2008 Xen xenserver xensource

Recent Comments

  • C program on Red Hat Launches Virtual Storage Appliance For Amazon Web Services
  • Hamzaoui on $500 Million For XenSource, Where Did All The Money Go?
  • vijay kumar on NComputing Debuts X350
  • Samar on VMware / SpringSource Acquires GemStone Systems
  • Meo on Cisco, Citrix Join Forces To Deliver Rich Media-Enabled Virtual Desktops

Copyright © 2025 · Genesis Sample on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

  • Newsletter
  • Advertise
  • Contact
  • About