Looking forward to Extreme blue this summer
I had my first meeting with the Extreme Blue team for this summer and I have to say: I’m psyched. This is going to be one kick ass summer. Just hearing about the project has me pumped up to start working on it.
We went over in a bit more detail what the project will cover and what they hope to accomplish with the “Continuous Availability Manager”. The two other techincal interns, Megan Schneider and Adam Edelstein, are Linux enthusiasts and have experience in distributive and parallel computing.
I started scouring the net to learn more about the Xen hypervisor and High-availability Linux. I have Xen installed and running on my SUSE laptop, but I know I have only scratched the surface. We will be developing around the SUSE Linux distrobution, which just today announced its plans for improved virtualization support and security in SUSE SLES 11 to be released in mid 2008.
Virtualization is going be one of those inflection points in the computer industry where we’ll look back and say, “Wow, I remember the days when we didn’t have virtualization. How did we do business without it?”
If you combine this virtualization idea with pervasive computing, you could create a seamless network of devices that allow end users to migrate their desktop from portable device to the next with ease. Of course, the short term benefits will be in the server arena: allowing improved uptime, ease of scheduled maitanence, while lowering the cost of ownership of hardware by increasing utilization.
Virtualization’s impact on desktop computing will be limitted at first, but might one day cause the demise of the personal computer and a return to the mainframe and thin client model. Yes, as hard as it might be to imagine - I could easily see that return. Think of GMail’s success. What is it? It’s simply a mainframe with dummy terminals, aka browsers. Will browsers be the future operating system? No - but virtualized operating systems that migrate from device to device seamlessly would work quite well. It allows programmers to keep the multi windowed operating system paradigm in tact while providing the benefits of mobility over mixed platforms like a browser does.