Is Google using KVM-based hardware virtualization?
 |
For years Google has been pretty adamant that it doesn’t need hardware virtualization.
Everything started in 2007 when a Google engineer, Luiz André Barroso, said at the Usenix conference:
I think it will be very sad if we need to use virtualization,” he said. “It is hard to claim we will never use it, but we don’t really use it today.
In April 2009 Google even (indirectly) responded to VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz about the idea that virtualization is the only viable way to do cloud computing.
But now, apparently, something changed at the search giant.
The KVM Forum 2010 just ended and the speakers slide decks are now available online. They are full of extremely interesting details about the KVM project and its roadmap.
And one of them is especially interesting: Ganeti as a KVM cluster management interface.
Ganeti is a cluster management solution for Xen and KVM that supports live migration, para-virtualized and fully virtualized guest operating systems.
The solution is released under the GPL (v2) open source license and maintained by a number of Google employees.
This doesn’t imply that Google itself is using it, but one of the last slides in the slide deck above seem to confirm so:
The presenter, Guido Trotter, is a Systems Administrator at Google, responsible for the corporate infrastructure, and the maintenance of the corporate services.
Now, maybe Google only runs on the “Corporate Computing Infrastructure” internal facilities like CRM, Accounting or other technologies, while keeping its core services on bare-metal.
But at least now there’s a confirmation that Google is not totally against hardware virtualization and instead is using KVM internally.
virtualization.info Newest articles
May 24th, 2012
Today Milan hosted the VMware Forum 2012, during the opening keynote Brian Gammage, VMware’s Chief Market Technologist, tried to collect all the news and declarations we heard in the last…
May 23rd, 2012
Yesterday VMware announced the acquisition of Wanova Inc. a company whose main product is called Mirage.
Mirage is a centralized management and recovery solution for physical desktop images over the…
May 23rd, 2012
Yesterday VMware published a paper focused on VMware vMSC (vSphere Metro Storage Cluster), a new configuration within the VMware Hardware Compatibility List intended for environments where disaster/downtime avoidance is a…
May 22nd, 2012
Yesterday, during its annual conference in Las Vegas, EMC announced the acquisition of Syncplicity, a cloud-storage privately held startup founded in 2008 and based in Menlo Park, California.
Terms…
May 21st, 2012
On May 18th Oracle announced the general availability of version 3.1 of its x86 enterprise virtualization solution VM Server.
This release follows 3.0 announced on August 24th 2011.
All the new…
May 21st, 2012
In this post, published on May 18 in VROOM! Blog, the VMware’s Performance Team presented some of the most significant enhancements and optimizations brought to Teradici‘s PCoIP protocol in the…
May 17th, 2012
On May 15th NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA® VGX™ platform that will be available later this year through NVIDIA’s hardware OEM and VDI partners.
This new platform promises to deliver…
May 17th, 2012
Microsoft announced this week the new Beta version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) 7.0 Beta.
The Beta program opened on May 15th and the review…
May 15th, 2012
Today VMware announced VMware vFabric Suite 5.1, expected to be generally available in Q2 2012.
vFabric Suite 5.1 includes vFabric Application Director, to automate the deployment and management of vFabric…
May 15th, 2012
On April 4 Stephen Herrod, VMware’s CTO, has attended, as guest speaker, at a VMUG meeting in Italy.
One of the key point of the speech, documented in one hour-long…
May 14th, 2012
Last week Citrix announced a new tech preview for Hosted Server VDI technology that allows cloud providers to leverage Microsoft SPLA to host VDI-style desktops obtaining a pay-as-you-go monthly subscription licensing…
May 11th, 2012
On May 7 Atlantis Computing announced the general availability of its Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI 3.2, this product, tailored in particular for VMware View 5.1, enables virtual desktops deployment…
May 11th, 2012
On May 7 Citrix announced a technology preview of Project Aruba that extends Citrix VDI all-in-one proposal for the SMB market, VDI-in-a-Box, with personal vDisk technology.
VDI-in-a-Box, inherited from Kaviza…
May 10th, 2012
On May 7 Cloud Sidekick announced the Early Access Program release of Cato Enterprise Edition (EE) which extends the Community Edition (CE) with Storm Deployment Automation and support for…
Copyright © 2003-2012 virtualization.info. All rights reserved.
virtualization.info | cloudcomputing.info | virtualization.tv | Virtualization Congress