For years my typical knock against all the people inside EMC running around thinking I should bow down to the magnificence that is VMware was “So I’m supposed to get excited about selling shipping containers for operating systems?”
They didn’t like that and they didn’t like it because I was right.
A virtual machine is a shipping container for whatever much more interesting thing was placed in it.
And that was the case for a long while until VMware started changing.
Taking my same Virtual Appliance I used to have a look around Redis I downloaded the 90 Day evaluation of tc Server 6.0 from SpringSource and took a look at that. No wget this time since it’s behind a thankfully brief registration form with the full tc Server bundle being 170MB in size. A hell of a lot smaller than WebLogic or WebSphere but orders of magnitude larger than Redis.
After running install.sh I was presented with a bunch of options all appearing to offer me the ability to install a host of stuff I probably wouldn’t need, so after just selecting the Application Server I hit a bump when it wouldn’t install into a directory which wasn’t already created. mkdir solved that problem and then we were away.
tc Server has a hell of a lot more options than I had expected and it took me a bit to figure out what was where, this is what I get for relying solely on the kindness of the –h flag instead of reading the docs but I created two server instances, checked they were listening and then modified their server.xml files to configure a session replication cluster.
I could have probably created 200 or 2000 instances and done the same thing but two struck me as enough and it saved on keystrokes.
Now on my colourful Guest VM I had a clustered application server and a high performance in memory database running at the same time. Not being a developer I didn’t have an app to take advantage of any of that but probably the longest part of the entire process was downloading the tc Server installation files.
"Well bravo Zilla you made a bunch of workload proven code do what it should do out of the box, so therefore you're now an expert on everything." Hardly, but the point is all this stuff is now part of what’s becoming a VMware Suite and I'd have no cause to look at it were that not the case.
I think that's going to be true of a lot of people. I think a lot more eyeballs are going to focus on these now.
Lets look at the new suite of VMware technologies from top to bottom, had I artistic ability I’d draw it but I don’t so you can visualise it with nice shapes and colours in your own head as you read it off this chart.
Now doesn't that look a lot more interesting than running the contents of a VMDK file and moving it around the place? So, how far away are the rest of us from provisioning an application in vCenter and watching as tens, hundreds or thousands of configured instances come online to support the application workload?
Not that far.
The hyperscale people already operate in some similar fashion but that way of running your infrastructure is on the cusp of coming down to the folks with more modest needs and who don't have an army of people with PhDs working in their IT department.
I think technologically there's a gap to be filled with the concept of the Guest OS but I'm not Paul Maritz and therefore being mortal I could be wrong. Right now you bring your own OS, be that Linux, Windows, Solaris, BSD or so on and while I'm not advocating VMware (or EMC) going shopping for a distro vendor I think we'll see some form of side approach to a VMware specific Guest OS the way we've seen it in other places on that chart.
Were it to occur all I can guess is that it'll probably be Open Source.
Sure you can still bring your own but if you don't care here's Just Enough of our OS to run all the bits above it on the chart and we'll take care of the licensing, deployment, support and patching.
We'll see one way or another I suppose. If it's actually a gap it'll get filled soon.
