LCE: The failure of operating systems and how we can fix it

LCE: The failure of operating systems and how we can fix it

Posted Nov 22, 2012 9:15 UTC (Thu) by hensema (guest, #980)
Parent article: LCE: The failure of operating systems and how we can fix it

Costa forgets important uses of virtualisation:

• Isolation of customers. Each customer can be king of his virtual machine. You'll never achieve this in a single OS instance.
• Migration of VMs. You're not dependent on the hardware you've started the instance on. A VM can be migrated to faster/newer/more stable/cheaper/whatever hardware on-the-fly. It's common for VMs to have higher uptime than any physical hardware in the data centre.
• Easy provisioning. Sure, you can do PXE boot and auto install an OS. But it'll never be as easy and flexible as provisioning a VM

Surely there's a lot to be won in process or user isolation in Linux itself. That'll both be useful when running on bare metal or on a HV. However Costa seems to want to go back to the hayday of mainframes and minis. That's not going to happen. Sorry.

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