On Jun 14, 2009, at 3:20 PM, Wes Felter wrote:
This is a pet peeve of mine, so I would be willing to do it. I added a
VMware column, but I don't feel comfortable adding rows unless there
is some consensus on what they should be. VMware has a lot of small
but IMO essential features that most clouds don't have (e.g. full
virtualization, shared block storage, thin provisioning, HA, VLANs,
reverse ARP, etc.) but it's not clear to me that we want the feature
matrix to get into that level of detail.
Hrm... I think that's an inaccurate assertion. And it seems like you probably missed some of the more interesting VMware features. I'm not sure what you mean by 'full virtualization'. I'm guessing you mean guests with unmodified operating systems.
Your initial list:
- full virtualization (unmodified guests): GoGrid, ElasticHosts, and probably FlexiScale
- shared block storage: not really sure what you mean... between hosts or guests???
- thin provisioning: not a feature specific to VMware at all; doable with any reasonable backing store; many clouds already do this
- high availability: VMware does this best, but FlexiScale already claims hot standby failover
- VLANs: GoGrid and others
- reverse ARP: what for?
Missed, but of particular interest:
- memory overcommit: end user won't care, but worth mentioning since no one else does it yet
- DRS: dynamic movement of live VMs based on resource/workload needs
- dmotion: live migration of VM backing storage files; still mostly a VMware-only feature
--Randy