From owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Nov 25 00:21:14 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2A8AC16A4CE for ; Thu, 25 Nov 2004 00:21:14 +0000 (GMT) Received: from smtp101.rog.mail.re2.yahoo.com (smtp101.rog.mail.re2.yahoo.com [206.190.36.79]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 8226943D54 for ; Thu, 25 Nov 2004 00:21:13 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from Mike.Jeays@rogers.com) Received: from unknown (HELO ?192.168.2.100?) (mjeays2551@24.114.152.139 with plain) by smtp101.rog.mail.re2.yahoo.com with SMTP; 25 Nov 2004 00:21:11 -0000 From: Mike Jeays To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain Organization: Message-Id: <1101342070.1100.39.camel@chaucer> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.2.4 Date: 24 Nov 2004 19:21:10 -0500 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: VMWare X-BeenThere: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Non technical items related to the community List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2004 00:21:14 -0000 We had an excellent presentation today by staff from VMWare. I was very impressed by their ability to move applications from one physical server to another with only a half-second interruption in service. Their latest offering sits directly on the hardware of an i86 processor, and virtualizes it so that several guest operating systems can be run. They claim about a 5% overhead, which seems very reasonable. I can clearly understand its use with Windows, which needs frequent reboots when applying patches and for all sorts of other maintenance, and these changes can be made on virtual servers, including the reboot, without disturbing other virtual machines. I didn't get a very good answer to my question about whether it was worth using if all the client operating systems were FreeBSD or Linux. For these (much better) OSs, reboots are very rarely needed. The OS provides all the facilities required for protecting applications from one another, and sharing resources between applications in a reasonable way. It is easy to kill runaway applications. So would there be much point in running VMWare with several guest copies of FreeBSD? As another question - are there any attempts to develop an open-source equivalent?