VMware Wants VMs to Be Modern Shrink Wrap for Software

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In rolling out its VMware Technology Network last week, the server virtualization subsidiary of EMC not only expanded on the VCommunity development community it created about six months ago, but it also set itself up to do something truly interesting with a virtual machine that no one has talked about yet and which makes perfect sense once you hear it. VMware wants companies to distribute their software inside prepackaged virtual machines that are ready to run. In short, the company wants a VM to be the modern equivalent of a shrink-wrapped cardboard box--albeit something that is more useful than a piece of cardboard to put on a shelf.

This is a very clever idea, and demonstrates once again why VMware was a good company for EMC to buy for $625 million back in December 2003. (As I have said before, by my math, EMC will have got all of that investment back by about Halloween or so of this year, which is a pretty good return on investment.)

The idea of shipping software inside of pre-configured virtual machines is being pitched as part of the VMware Technology Network, which is a subscription-based service that VMware is launching to help developers better deploy virtual machines in their development, testing, and production environments. The VMTN site, which is at www.vmtn.net, is a distinct site from the VMware brochureware, and intentionally so. According to Srinivas Krishnamurti, group product manager at VMware, the VMTN site will include pre-built application environments that might, for instance, include the Web, application, and database tiers of a multi-tiered application environment. It is here that the application and middleware software will be wrapped up in a VM for immediate deployment to various operating systems. Krishnamurti says that Oracle has been quietly shipping its 10g database inside VMs for a while already, and VMware is working with Linux distributors Red Hat and Novell so that a Linux stack can be distributed inside a VM as well.

The reason this makes any sense, of course, is because a virtual machine created for the company's Workstation virtualization product (which is used by developers) has exactly the same settings and is functionally equivalent to a virtual machine running in the host-guest environment of the GSX Server virtualization product or the full-blown ESX Server product, which runs atop a hypervisor on the bare iron and supports virtual machines on that hypervisor. So if you create a pre-configured virtual machine running Linux and Oracle 10g, for instance, and drop it onto a Web site, you can distribute the software inside that VM, and more importantly, customers who use VMware GSX Server or ESX Server in production or Workstation in development will be able to grab that VM with the software inside and it will just start working. No one has to set up the virtual machine or the software running inside of it. "We think this is a new paradigm for software distribution," says Krishnamurti. The word "paradigm" gets overused a lot on the IT business, but he may just turn out to be right. If there is one thing no one wants to do, it is spend a lot of time setting up software. In a virtualized environment, it would be downright stupid not to distribute software in this manner. In a sense, EMC is now in the packaging business--if this concept takes off, that is. Krishnamurti says that just about any software vendor will be interested in this idea, and packaging up open source software stacks like Apache, JBoss, and MySQL seem like a no-brainer. (He mentioned open source software stack distributor SpikeSource by name, and said that VMware was in talks with them.) But being mentioned doesn't mean much. "We will be platform neutral and software vendor neutral," explains Krishnamurti. "What we are interested in is virtual machines becoming a new kind of software container."

In the meantime, the developers will be on the cutting edge, as they always are, and they will be enthusiastic about the idea because they spend 20 to 30 percent of their time setting up machines just to test code before it runs in production. They can subscribe to the VMTN for $299 per developer per year, and get access to the preconfigured VMs as well as licenses to VMware's Workstation, GSX Server, ESX Server Developer Edition with VirtualSMP for making VMs span multiple processors, and the P2V Assistant, which converts physical server installations to virtual machines. The site also has lots of tech support documents, best practices, white papers, and such. It was supposed to be functional as of yesterday.