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.