Current operating systems (OSs), available as ISO images or on CD/DVD media, arrive to you with the assumption that they’re condemned to life as the soul of a single dedicated computer. They’re optimized for this singular purpose and we like it; we like it fine. But how much longer will these single-purpose, physical machine, operating systems prevail? When will we see an OS that’s ready to play nice on the Hypervisor of your choice right out of the box?
A virtual OS would have all of the platform-specific tools pre-installed so that the OS deploys in an optimal state. We need an OS that knows it’s virtual and thrives on that virtual reality.
A hypervisor aware operating system is an interesting concept. From the most basic bits, this OS is built for hypervisor-based virtualization. In fact, in a perfect world, the OS would detect the hypervisor type and offer its own set of optimizations for that platform. Native or near-native performance is what we’re after by using hypervisor-based virtualization so why not have the best possible selections already made.
Would software vendors or independent developers embrace such a concept alongside current standard OS offerings? Chances are good that they would. The virtual OS (VOS) has the potential of having a much smaller disk footprint, of requiring fewer memory and CPU resources and of being easier and faster to deploy for a wide range of workloads and services.
Systems administrators responsible for deploying virtual machines often create a set of templates or “canned” OS installations and then customize them for a particular purpose. With a VOS, not only would they already have a template OS install but they would also have the possibility of customizing during the install process — much like creating virtual appliances with SUSE Studio or VMware’s Virtual Appliance Studio. While these “studios” work well for creating appliances, they don’t reflect the full concept of hypervisor aware OSs.
Templates take up a lot of disk space, quickly become obsolete and are as prone to sprawl as virtual machines are. Fresh OS installations burn hours of time to complete and require patches, updates and post-install customization. The solution is to create VOSs that update, customize and optimize themselves during installation.
There would need to be considerable cooperation between OS builders, virtual OS builders and virtualization vendors for either the hypervisor or non-hypervisor concepts to work. What are the barriers to this type of operating system? It’s possible that everyone is waiting for someone else to create the perfect hypervisor, the perfect OS or the perfect set of tools. The answer may lie in an air of cooperation between technology companies.
I’m hoping that Microsoft’s recent dedication to open source software via its CodePlex Foundation and TechNet’s Port25 will help others extend their hands toward Microsoft in these efforts. Hyper-V promises a new world of possibilities to companies that are just discovering virtualization. Novell is also part of the CodePlex Foundation whose membership might begin the trend for such cooperation among technological rivals.
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