[ Cloud Computing ] Re: why virtualization?

>> BTW, IMHO, elasticity was never the goal of virtualization not can we achieve elasticity by virtualization – they are orthogonal

 

As far as we know, Amazon is based on a Xen infrastructure (i.e. virtualization). How are they achieving elasticity and scalability?

 

--utpal

 

On 12/17/08, Krishna Sankar (ksankar) <ksankar@cisco.com> wrote:

Dan,

Good line of thought. Couple of points:

 

a)      Power efficiency – I think an 8 core machine (with 7.5 VM processes) would use less power than 8 small machines (say powered by via itx). But if one is using only one VM and one process, then the rest of the power is wasted

b)      Yes, from an enterprise IT application infrastructure perspective, virtualization s a short term solution with a cloud infrastructure as the long term goal

c)       Virtualization in some sense is getting more granularity than a hardware box (for better utilization) and that would eventually shift to the infrastructure providers

d)      BTW, IMHO, elasticity was never the goal of virtualization not can we achieve elasticity by virtualization – they are orthogonal

e)      Same goes with scale and ad-hocness

f)       And as you point out, virtualization has serious drawbacks – like multi-core and extra overhead.

 

Cheers & happy holidays

<k/>

 

From: cloud-computing@googlegroups.com [mailto:cloud-computing@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Dan Kearns
Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2008 9:06 AM
To: cloud-computing@googlegroups.com
Subject: [ Cloud Computing ] why virtualization?

 

Out of curiosity.... it seems to me that two pretty fundamental tenets of cloud computing are contradictory:

Virtualization: a mechanism to get better utilization of existing hardware when loads are generally smaller than node capacity, or spiky in the time domain

Griddiness: (for lack of a better word) the idea that appropriate cloud designs support massive scale, and do it by aggregating many small+cheap failure-prone compute units with smarter software

If the goals are to have smarter software and maximize utilization (or minimize power consumption for equivalent compute capacity), then why introduce the constant runtime overhead of virtualization instead of, eg using smaller more power-efficient compute-unit designs and making the hardware controllable by software?

Am I missing something, or is virtualization a tactical answer and therefore a short-term solution, and not a great place to start building management frameworks (for example) on top of?

-d

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