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back to article Hypervisors are sooo 2005. For hip containers, you need a 'Microvisor'

VMware has created a new hypervisor and a new variant of its flagship vSphere product, both aimed at containerised computing and “cloud-native apps.” “Photon Machine” is the name for a new, stripped-back version of ESX that's being cast as a “microvisor”. The Machine is designed to host virtual machines running Photon OS, the …

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  1. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Yeah, OK

    Yeah, OK. If they build single-purpose VMs with custom kernel as opposed to "containers", just brainstorming, they can have:

    Custom kernel, it knows it's running on VMWare, so it only needs to probe for hardware VMware actually supports. Paravirtualized hard disk and network, and tickless (although I think most kernels do this by default anyway.) Take out unnecessary time delays from the kernel (that real hardware may need but virtualized doesn't... like delays while probing PCI bus, USB, delays for disks to spin up or "settle", and on.)

    Custom userland... customized bootup, you can have a pretty minimal init that just runs whatever the container/VM is supposed to run. And only whatever libraries the particular application you are running needs. I think some containers already do this -- if you just containerize a whole Linux install you've got a GB or 2 of stuff in there, but if the container contains only needed libs it could be under 50MB.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Trollface

    Hipstervisors

    No explanation necessary.

    3 0 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Okaaayyy

    Someone is going to be offended but this looks a lot like Microsoft's current strategy; throw a bunch of features in wild configurations and see what's used at the end of the day.

    1 0 Reply
  4. Tim99 Silver badge

    Pareidolia

    I'm not sure if the article's image is meant to show visual pareidolia, or not.

    After reminding myself of the definition: A psychological phenomenon involving an image wherein the mind perceives a familiar pattern where none actually exists. I am still not sure if the image is apposite to the article, or not

    2 0 Reply
    1. Someone_Somewhere
      Reply Icon

      Re: Pareidolia

      the bastard offspring of Apophenia.*

      * or 'Big Data' as she is ofttimes cruelly named behind her back.

      0 0 Reply

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