VMware's VMI Presented at Ottawa Linux Symposium
Posted by Fraser Campbell Thu, 20 Jul 2006 22:54:00 GMT
Today there were several presentations related to virtualization, first came Zachary Amsden presenting VMware’s VMI work.
Zach’s presentation was very technical and informative. Differences between traditional (full) virtualization and paravirtualization were discussed, some highly technical discussions followed and finally benchmarks were displayed.
One of the most interesting things I noted from the presentation were Zach’s statements that paravirtualization is inevitable and “paravirtualization provides significant performance gains over traditional virtualization”.
A further interesting note on paravirtualization is the statement that long-term paravirtualization will continue to be a better approach regardless of VT hardware (not an exact quote) – this is in agreement with the Xen/Xensource philosophy and very much in contrast to the statements recently from Virtual Iron (see Paravirtualization is a Dead-End Approach).
Zach showed benchmarks of a VMI Linux machine running under a VMware product (I would guess a build of ESX 3) and performance was good (around 90% for most metrics). If you are interested in more details on VMI you can refer to Zach’s paper in the OLS proceedings documents (not entirely the same as what was presented).
OLS Proceedings can be downloaded from http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2006/proceedings.php.
