Will hypervisors make Ubuntu and other Linux operating systems obsolete?

David M Williams
Wednesday, 16 July 2008 21:05

Business IT - Technology

Computing is on the verge of a major paradigm shift with the modern rise in prominence of virtualisation. Fuelled by big corporates interested in the consolidation and energy saving potentials, improvements in virtualisation have hit the point where Linux could be a casualty.

Here’s why: virtualisation is a hot item for managers of large technology infrastructures. Case studies have proven its potential to greatly reduce the number of server computers in an organisation without any loss of functionality. Servers for different purposes, servers running legacy operating systems, servers running applications that don’t cohabit with each other nicely – even 32- and 64-bit architectures – can all be reduced to a stack of virtualised computers running on a far lesser number of actual servers. Each virtual server continues to have its own identity, its own protected memory and disk storage, its own network address and all else that defines it as a unique fully-fledged machine.

Historically, this necessitated having a “real” operating system on the “real” computer. The software which provides the virtual computers then ran on top like any ordinary application, be it VMWare, Microsoft Virtual Server, Xen or something else. The real operating system, as per usual, was loaded with drivers to interface with the hardware. As far as the virtual computers were concerned, the hardware was stock standard stuff; like Neo in the Matrix the virtual environment told it what devices it had which could be worlds apart from the real hardware. This totally removed any dependency the virtual computers had on real hardware configurations – meaning the virtual computer could be relocated from one physical machine to another, with no concern needed about hardware compatibility or drivers.

Now, this got people thinking. After all, if you have a collection of virtual computers on your server atop a real underlying operating system at the bottom, it seems a bit wasteful to have that non-virtual layer there. Interest developed in scrapping that non-virtual element out. Ok, granted, you need something to start with to map the virtual hardware to the real hardware and to actually provide the virtual environments in the first place. If, however, you could embed this at a really low level – even on to the very silicon making up the processor itself – then not only would you eliminate a layer but you’d even give a performance boost to everything remaining.

Here’s where hypervisors come in. You’ll have heard this word; it’s a key element in Microsoft’s strategy for Windows Server 2008 despite the fact it was only released in beta form when that server platform was made available. It’s what separates VMWare Server from the higher-end enterprise level VMWare ESX series of their products.

Now, consider this: if you can effectively remove the need for a base operating system, and the virtual operating systems don’t require support for a raft of drivers then you can conceivably drastically simplify what an operating system is in general.

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