On Jul 3, 2009, at 7:52 AM, Edmonds, AndrewX wrote:
Regarding: "I do not want to split hairs, but I am interested (from a customer perspective) to be able to deploy arbitrary OS-images inside my virtual machine, so the OS is not part of the service offered by the Iaas-provider."
The OS selection may have dependencies on the IaaS owing to hardware architectures it supports (i386, x86_64, PPC, MIPS etc) so it may not be possible to run arbitrary OS that assume a particular h.architecture. Currently the only sure way to guarantee arbitrary OS deployment could be the provisioning of instruction set emulation within a hypervisor. Other than that as a simpler solution, the IaaS provider would have to state what hardware architectures it could support (though would limit arbitrary OS deployment).
I'm not sure this is true. Clearly x86 has 'won' at this point. You can certainly come up with edge cases, but for the vast majority of the market place no-x86 platforms don't matter. The bigger problem is that hypervisor variance between providers means that it's not as easy to simply upload any Xen or VMware image. You actually need to match hypervisors closely AND make sure the appropriate paravirt disk/net drivers are installed into the image before upload (if possible). Alternatively, the provider could dynamically convert images on the fly, but this is a non-trivial capability that is multiplicative in terms of the number of configurations that would need to be supported to be useful to everyone. Still, you could get a lot of traction just doing VMware -> Xen in PVM or HVM mode. --Randy Randy Bias, Cloud Strategist +1 (415) 939-8507 [m], randyb@neotactics.com BLOG: http://cloudscaling.com