VMware defends its position about hypervisor standardization efforts

During last days VMware and Xen have been under fire for how they conducted works to create a standard hypervisor interface for Linux kernel.

At Ottawa Linux Symposium VMware approach has not mentioned among viable solutions and Oracle lamented both companies have been too slow in reaching an agreement on how to proceed.

VMware Vice President of Technology Development, Steve Herrod, now speaks from its corporate blog, to answer critics and definitively clarify company position about Xen and standardization efforts:

Despite the headlines, the various groups focusing on Linux paravirtualization are actually working together well.

First and foremost, some have implied VMware is trying to slow down virtualization competition in the Linux space. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

The motivation for proposing VMI as an alternate approach to Linux paravirtualization was to help ensure that Linux gets a sustainable, customer- and ISV-friendly set of interfaces. We think this is in the best long-term interest of the community. Obviously we’re also quite interested in making sure that Linux’s paravirtualization implementation is independent of any specific hypervisor implementation allowing VMware, Xen, and others to compete in this space.

Overall, we believe the VMI-Linux is an excellent approach, but it’s more important that the community as a whole quickly converges on an interface that maintains the main principles of the transparent paravirtualization approach. On this note, VMware, IBM, XenSource, and others are actively cooperating on a merged approach to kernel integration using an approach called “paravirt-ops”.

In the end, paravirt-ops may or may not end up being very similar to today’s VMI-Linux approach. Regardless, we remain committed to working with the community to come up with a publicly designed Linux interface that works well for both existing and future hypervisors.

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