| Diane Green's First Blog |
| Tuesday, 04 April 2006 by Michel Roth | |||
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"First is the specification of the virtual machine format. Is it going to be a license-free industry standard? If it is not and one company owns the license, they will have a defining control point over virtualization. The disk format of a virtual machine and the libraries that use that format will define how people provision, patch, recover, and otherwise manipulate their virtual machines. Microsoft is today pushing a standard called VHD that has a Microsoft license as a requirement for full access. VMware has offered a specification, VMDK, that is freely available and has no license requirement. The second area is the question of whether virtualization should be tightly integrated into the operating system or instead a separate wholly independent layer. Tight integration comes at the unfortunate cost of giving up bias-free choice of operating system and thus software stack (i.e. OS and application program). The use of this freedom of choice can be seen clearly in hardware appliances like firewalls, routers, cell phones, DVRs, and set-top boxes. We judge an appliance by what it can do, how well it can do, and how much it costs. The underlying software does not matter and the appliance designer has the freedom to choose the best possible software stack for their appliance. They can take an OS written from scratch, customized from open source, or a 20-year-old kernel that happens to match their needs..." Read on here.
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