Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell • Hacker News Board

Re: Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell

#31

Post by nailer » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 3:56 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #9

sangaya wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in one of the vSphere training classes the instructor informed us that the hypervisor is completely homegrown and that only the Management Console (which is a VM that provides CLI access) runs on top of a Linux kernel.

That was my understanding - that Linux instance is really a special purpose guest running "alongside" the other guests on top of the hypervisor.

If you watch ESX boot, the Linux kernel starts first - the 'VMkernel' is started via the vmkmod.ko module.

Not saying that VMware Inc are wrong, but Linux runs VMkernel. VMkernel may them 'subsume' its parent kernel somehow but I'm not sure how they'd accomplish this, nor do VMware like talking about how this is achieved.

Re: Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell

#32

Post by jhammerb » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 4:01 PM UTC

munchhausen wrote: post #3

So what could be VMware's plans for SuSE Linux? I am not familiar enough with their strategy to be able to speculate on this question, but I am curious - it certainly does not look like an "obvious" acquisition to me. Keep in mind that SuSE Linux was not profitable under Novell - IIRC the SuSE venture finally broke even in the last FY, so it's not like VMware are buying SuSE to rake in the Enterprise Linux revenue.

Independence from Red Hat, since Red Hat sees VMware as their biggest competitor: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/199870/red_hat...

Re: Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell

#33

Post by nailer » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 4:09 PM UTC

munchhausen wrote: post #25

larrycatinspace wrote: post #10

Does anyone know if this includes any the Unix source or copyrights that Novell had as well?

I don't think it does - it is just the SuSE venture that is being sold to VMware. I would imagine that the copyrights are held by the "rest of Novell".

Would they keep the Unix-like part of the business together?

Re: Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell

#34

Post by arethuza » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 5:27 PM UTC

nailer wrote: post #31

arethuza wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my understanding - that Linux instance is really a special purpose guest running "alongside" the other guests on top of the hypervisor.

If you watch ESX boot, the Linux kernel starts first - the 'VMkernel' is started via the vmkmod.ko module. Not saying that VMware Inc are wrong, but Linux runs VMkernel. VMkernel may them 'subsume' its parent kernel somehow but I'm not sure how they'd accomplish this, nor do VMware like talking about how this is achieved.

The way someone explained it to me is that the Linux kernel loads the hypervisor "under" itself.

Re: Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell

#35

Post by nodata » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 6:05 PM UTC

cdavid wrote: post #13

c00p3r wrote: post #11

Why one need all this shitload when there is kvm? -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 64K 2010-08-20 23:44 kvm-amd.ko -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 86K 2010-08-20 23:44 kvm-intel.ko -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 478K 2010-08-20 23:44 kvm.ko qemu-kvm and libvirt based stuff with a community support?

Vmware is one of the few software I have ever bought, I am pretty hardcore open source otherwise. Vmware works very well, has top notch clone/backup/rollback feature, can automatically install tons of different OS. That's a real time saver. I use kvm at work where we don't have vmware licenses, and while it does work nicely, there is still no working rollback that I know of, and the network configuration is a PITA in…

Oh come on. ESX isn't the shining example you make it out to be, true KVM doesn't have as nice snapshots as ESX, but ESX has snapshots that are implemented very poorly - a never-ending delta that grows and grows and grows and takes performance with it eventually too. How many times have I lose a VM while cleaning up snapshots? Not enough to count on more than one hand, but that's still too many times.

Re: Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell

#36

Post by hga » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 7:00 PM UTC

munchhausen wrote: post #24

hga wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm ... I had no difficultly imagining that Netware would die a hard death in the early 90s. My memory of the exact details are a bit fuzzy at this remove (I might be e.g. confounding versions 2 and 3), but its fatal flaw was no memory protection. And as I recall, at least early on, the entire directory structure was in memory (this was an issue for my company in provisioning them for document imaging storage). So i…

> My memory of the exact details are a bit fuzzy at this remove (I might be e.g. confounding versions 2 and 3), but its fatal flaw was no memory protection. You are correct, Netware 3 ran everything in Ring 0, which also made it so fast. Memory protection was added in Netware 4, but you can still opt for running applications in non-protected address space all the way up to Netware 6.5 (latest, and almost certainly th…

Interesting.

Wikipedia claims "In 4.x and earlier versions, NetWare did not support preemption, virtual memory, graphical user interfaces, etc. Processes and services running under the NetWare OS were expected to be cooperative, that is to process a request and return control to the OS in a timely fashion. On the down side, this trust of application processes to manage themselves could lead to a misbehaving application bringing down the server."

If true, memory protection without preemptive multitasking is still basically unacceptable (just not something you can base a healthy server ecosystem on; we had enough "fun" of that sort with non-preemptive 16 bit Windows client).

The article also notes that TCP/IP was a second class citizen at best until Netware 5.x in October 1998, "during a time when NetWare market share dropped precipitously...."

In general it notes Netware's kernel had a big speed advantage which became less important as systems steadily became faster (and I suspect its tunable caching became less useful).

Re: Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell

#37

Post by rualthan » Tue, Sep 21, 2010, 2:21 PM UTC

fname wrote: post #15

rualthan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my first comment here. Oh Boy! how easy and fast it was to sign up!! I sign just to comment because the comment "(VSphere, 4i) are built on top of the SuSE Linux kernel" is so wrong. The Classic ESX has Service Console is is customized RHEL. ESXi does not have the Service Console. It still does have a command console where one can run ESX commands and a limited set of Unix commands which AFAIK are Busybox's.…

Welcome! The Classic ESX has Service Console is is customized RHEL ESX 3.5 was built on top of RHEL, but vSphere 4 was completely redone. Ask anyone at VMware my friend.

Thanks.

"ESX 3.5 was built on top of RHEL" again far from accurate. The COS has been based on RHEL since the genesis of ESX. Whereas VMkernel is VMware's own creation. At least thats what they claim.

Even if the COS in ESX 4.X is based on SLES instead of RHEL, your point does not still make sense because VMware's future roadmap is to phase out Classic ESX. Sometime in the future, there will be only ESXi.