VMWare

[Mike Jeays]

We had an excellent presentation today by staff from VMWare.  I was very
impressed by their ability to move applications from one physical server
to another with only a half-second interruption in service.

Their latest offering sits directly on the hardware of an i86 processor,
and virtualizes it so that several guest operating systems can be run. 
They claim about a 5% overhead, which seems very reasonable.

I can clearly understand its use with Windows, which needs frequent
reboots when applying patches and for all sorts of other maintenance,
and these changes can be made on virtual servers, including the reboot,
without disturbing other virtual machines.

I didn't get a very good answer to my question about whether it was
worth using if all the client operating systems were FreeBSD or Linux. 
For these (much better) OSs, reboots are very rarely needed. The OS
provides all the facilities required for protecting applications from
one another, and sharing resources between applications in a reasonable
way.  It is easy to kill runaway applications. So would there be much
point in running VMWare with several guest copies of FreeBSD?

As another question - are there any attempts to develop an open-source
equivalent?