Bare Metal VM Farms

There has been a recent flurry of PR for a firm that is somewhat related to Citrix called Virtual Computing. I do not all the particulars but there is a financial relationship between the two. Citrix is well known for slim-client/remote client hosting solutions.

What caught my eye was the concept that a "hypervisor" would run on the hardware of choice sans a hosting OS. In turn it would host as many sessions as the client wanted (within the physical & electronic limitations) with multiple VMs running the applications desired in each one, That would allow the simultaneous use of Windows and the Linux of the month in separate windows without any possible "leakage" from one to the other.

Hallelujah, somebody has seen the light! That is the way to do virtual machines. Give each major application or group of applications its own solitary-confinement cell with nothing the OS can use to get to the other cells. A virus or Trojan should not be able to hop the gap from one cell to the other because they won't know they're there.

Truthfully I do not know exactly how that can be done in total but it is the absolute best possible sort of solution with the recently released and soon to be digital débutantes with multiple cores. If done right it puts the operator/admin in control. I would hope that there is some management capability even if its nothing more that a configuration boot file of some sort.

Each VM/cell gets at least one processor, a chunk of ram, some controlled access to the peripherals like printers, monitors etc and the hard drives (or soon to be sold state drives) are over somewhere else in their own network box. Yes everything is going to go through TCP/IP or some other network protocol.

A big advantage is that ONE installation of some sort of anti-malware is used to clean up the ENTIRE data-store for the entire digital facility.

Tighter security would also be a by-product. Accounting records are on one data-store totally inaccessible to those that should not be reading the payroll records. They could be stored in an entirely separate network with separate encryption and would not be stored on the accountant's desktop. When he shuts down for the day, the VM running his accounting program disappears from the desktop.

VMs are used to run everything and master copies of them will sit in a box somewhere else. You have a program you like that runs under Ubuntu but isn't available under Windows? Open a new VM and put in a copy of Ubuntu running in a VM you copied from a server.

The disk drives will have their own OS optimized to allow the drives to respond to ANY connecting OS or "hypervisor". Users will no longer need worry about hard drive formats. Folders will be virtual constructs instead of "real" objects.

One application that could run in one VM on each users desktop would be a search engine of some sort that could add storage silos in-house, out-of-house and Internet access. That could be the Gnome file directory or the Windows Explorer window. It's obvious that it would be some sort of database/search application that could tailor the output product's appearance or display to the OS making the request. The User could also tailor the application to do searches with criteria not currently available like historical lookup of corporate data from previous employees work on similar projects.

You want "cloud" computing? This brings cloud computing into a realm of manageable proportions. Imagine being able to run some sort of distributed program, video frame rendering or massive math calculations, that "borrow" computer cores from the office assistant's computer since she's only busy browsing her BFF's Facebook entries, or maybe the desktops that are otherwise sitting idle since their user's are out of the office?

I see this as a way to split up the server-farm and distribute it all over the building. Or have virtual servers come on-line and go away as demand pops up or ceases.

I have always been someone that believes to do multi-tasking right, you use multiple computers, not one computer with a bunch of cycle stealing windows. Using a "bare-metal" hypervisor or NO-OS VM mechanism with multiple cores and a honking big chunk of RAM is digital Nerdvana.

The only thing better would be that it comes as Open Source. Sadly it doesn't at least from this vendor.