[ Cloud Computing ] Re: why virtualization?

Virtualization is a lot more than consolidation and resource utilization.  It abstracts the OS and workload from physical hardware, reducing a very complex component to a file or two ..

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 12:05 PM, Dan Kearns <dan.kearns@gmail.com> wrote:

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

--
Cheers,
Jan

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