VMware hangs with the cool kids in the Containers gang If 2014 has a hotter infrastructure software topic than containerisation, your correspondent is yet to find it. The excitement comes from the fact that containerisation has been proved to work at colossal scale and looks to represent a lightweight and easy-to-manage alternative to virtualisation. Much discussion of …
"Container = Application running in isolated space = have these people not come across a mainframe??"
Never mind mainframe - its happened in Unix for years too.
Basically with anything related to virtualisation, if it hasn't happened to Windows, it hasn't happened. How people can talk about Windows being a serious server OS even now, never mind back in the days of NT and blue screens is beyond me , but there you go, you can't educate point and click monkeys.
Parallels Virtuozzo (later OpenVZ), Solaris Zones, FreeBSD jails, Linux VServer from 2000/2001. AFAIK IBM used special hardware on POWER boxes to virtualize over 1,000 Linux instances on one small server, but I'll give them credit too. The functionality that became today's Linux containers was patches in 2006, released in 2007, and had LXC support from early on. Docker came on the scene in 2011 I think. Windows has had container tech from 3rd parties for at least a decade too, primarily for thin client app delivery. Container technologies are as old as dirt. Not until Docker were they cool, though, so they deserve credit for making it easier and more popular.
Precisely. Solaris Zones (and now SmartOS) and FreeBSD Jails are probably the most solid container options and have been for a number of years. But anyway, there has been a whole bunch of options for well over a decade, indeed.
Colbert's claim is a little bit far fetched. But I suppose when it comes to getting yourself into the spotlight in order to sell something, facts are irrelevant.
Containers might be this week's zeitgeist-chasing meme, but they are also ancient. In computing terms, they date from the last ice age. Mainframes had it in the 70s, unix chroot since the 80s or earlier, and Solaris has had a mature product in widespread use for almost a decade.
Interesting article anyway. With containers being significantly different from VMs on terms of what they offer, it seems that they compliment virtualization rather than compete with it. All that has changed really is that Linux has at last got containerisation, so now you can have it under the GPL.
"With containers being significantly different from VMs on terms of what they offer, it seems that they compliment virtualization rather than compete with it. "
In many cases people are using VMs as application+OS containers, it is rare (in my experience) that they use them to mix different OSes or versions of OSes on a box. Containers can achieve the same end but more efficiently and more easily (because you have less layers to admin), so a significant portion of VMware's lunch could be eaten by containers.
Containers are quite new, popularized by Solaris. Mainframes had heavy weight virtualization for ages, where mainframe starts up a new whole kernel (using much ram). The difference to Solaris containers are that there is only one kernel active, and all container api calls are mapped to the single kernel. This uses very little ram, ie 40mb for every new container. One guy booted 1,000 containers on a 1gb ram Solaris pc. It was slow (swapped to swap file) but it worked.
Contrast this to VMware heavy weight solution: if you boot 1,000 VMs then each VM will use 2gb ram, eating up 2tb ram.
IBM has copied Solaris containers into AIX and calls them WPAR. Btw, Solaris has copied IBM LPAR virtualization and calls them LDOM.
Years ago, many solaris people considered not zfs nor dtrace being the killer feature, but Solaris containers. Today, years later, everyone is copying Solaris containers., ie docker, WPAR, etc.
Some have started to copy lesser known Solaris tech as well: SMF. Linux calls it systemd. SMF is great in large 32 socket servers, but not great in desktops. Systemd is useless in desktops. Linux has also copied Solaris crossbow (virtualized NIC) and calls it Open vSwitch. Great together with Solaris containers.
However, joyent SmartOS (opensolaris derivative) runs docker in a container, for increased security. In addition, you can run Linux binaries in a SmartOS container. Each Linux app call gets translated to the Solaris kernel api. So if you run 1,000 Linux instances in SmartOS docker, only one Solaris kernel is active, consuming less ram
I thought the vApp concept was containers on vsphere. Though I could be wrong and I never noticed vApps het traction. The concept was apps running directly on the hypervisor somehow. I think initially it was limited to java apps or something. I lost track a few years aho seems like.
Of course I could be wrong on what a vApp was I first heard about it maybe 2008 or 09
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