By Kurt Seifried (kurt@seifried.org)

A week ago I read an article with the title “BEA adopts virtual strategy with VMware” that changed my world, and just might change yours.

For those of you living under a rock, or chained to an old mainframe in the server room VMware is a suit of software tools, and now an OS in it’s own right that can run other operating systems within virtual containers. They have since been pushing hard into the application space. Application vendors such as Oracle and BEA largely view operating systems as a necessary evil. They generally don’t care what operating system you run the software on, insomuch as they have to support it, and that’s a pain in the *&%. Until now.

Vendor thinks “I sell software, software runs on OS, ergo I must support popular OS X, Y and Z to cover a large percentage of the market and sell some software” to which the customer responds “can you also support OS A though W, and configurations to the nth degree?” Often the vendor will then support some more operating systems, or not, and some more configurations, or not. Generally they need to operate on worst case assumptions since there are simply to many potential configurations, many of them unsafe, many of them simply insane.

But now, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. VMware’s suite of products is now mature, and widespread enough to actually allow vendors to ships VMware images which customers can simply drop in and start running. Contributing to this is the increasing speed and capacity of hardware which has lead to under utilize the available resources. A dual quad core system with 16 gigabytes of ram now occupies 1U of rack space and is quite affordable, and generally quite bored.

So we have a situation where customers have the software, hardware, and the expertise to take a vendor supplied operating system image (with application loaded) and run it. As an added benefit the customer can (in theory) dispense with the expertise needed to install and configure the application, and the underlying operating system (well maybe not quite, but it sure makes it easier).

Better yet we have a situation where the vendor can deploy the application and operating system in a specific known good configuration, and lock it down, perhaps with a warning similar to (from an Ensim X running on Red Hat Enterprise server):

Changes to system files may affect your warranty and discharge Ensim from any further obligation to provide customer with warranty services or support hereunder

Which means if you want to securely configure your system you may have to void the warranty in order to do so. Or you may break it horribly, and void the warranty.

Lovely.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/11/bea_virtualizaiton/