Canonical, VMware Create Skinny Linux for Virtual Appliances

Published: September 18, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

At the VMworld 2007 virtualization conference in San Francisco last week, Canonical, the commercial entity behind the Ubuntu variant of the Debian distribution of Linux, and VMware, the $26 billion gorilla of X64 server virtualization, announced that they have been working on creating a streamlined version of Ubuntu suitable for deployment in ESX Server hypervisors and offering a much smaller memory footprint. The Ubuntu JEOS Edition--short for Just Enough Operating System--is expected this fall alongside VMware's Virtual Appliance Development Kit.

According to Gerry Carr, marketing manager at Canonical, the JEOS edition has just the basic bits of Ubuntu that are required for running atop a virtual machine hypervisor. Extraneous pieces of the Linux distribution that are not required have been removed from JEOS, and in some ways, asking what it does not have is more relevant than asking what it does have. (You are supposed to pronounce JEOS like you were saying "juice," by the way, and no matter how many Monty Python and Masterpiece Theatre accents I try on, I cannot get the letters "jeos" to sound like juice. Looks like "GEE-OS" to me, but I am an American.)

Depending on the packages that customers install when they deploy the Ubuntu server edition, the resulting system can have a main memory footprint of anywhere from 320 MB to 686 MB, according to Carr. With JEOS, Ubuntu has taken out unnecessary drivers and libraries as well as removing the MySQL database, the CUPS printer drive, the Postfix email server, the slapd LDAP server, the Mutt mail user agent, and the EVMS volume manager. When you rip all of these things out, it reduces the high end of the server installation for Ubuntu from a 686 MB main memory footprint to somewhere around 215 MB. In early versions of the software, JEOS was paired with a VMware ESX Server hypervisor that weighed in at 65 MB. (Exactly which VMware hypervisor this is seems uncertain, since ESX Server 3 has a 2 GB profile and the future embedded ESX Server 3i hypervisor, which was announced last week, is supposed to fit in a 32 MB main memory footprint.) Carr says that JEOS will be supported on the regular ESX Server 3 and the forthcoming ESX Server 3i hypervisors.

According to Carr, the creation of JEOS came about because Canonical discovered that its Ubuntu Linux was the most popular download on VMware Technology Network, the download site that the virtualization company set up more than two years ago to promote the idea of packaging software and distributing it entirely within virtual machines. In this case, the virtual machine is the 21st century equivalent to a shrink-wrapped box and CDs, except because it is a virtualized environment, the software inside the VMware guest can be set up to be working as soon as it is opened up and run on a hypervisor. This is not the dumbest idea I ever heard--unless, of course, the software inside the package is malware and it has been automatically installed on my ESX Server instance on a production server. Let's hope that virtualization doesn't allow more clever forms of worms and Trojan horses.

Over the long haul, JEOS will support the Xen hypervisor as well as the KVM hypervisor, the former being the only practical commercial alternative to VMware for most Linux shops and the latter being yet another open source means of virtualizing servers. (Yes, I know Virtual Iron is technically as good or better than XenEnterprise and less expensive, too. But it is not a volume product yet. If the right buyer came along, it very well could be, though.) In any event, the roadmap for supporting Xen and KVM has not been set, and neither has the pricing mechanism for JEOS. Carr says that it could turn out that JEOS is distributed only to ISV and OEM partners looking to create virtual appliances that they in turn sell to customers.

"Ubuntu fits naturally into the place where computing is happening today," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu Project, in a statement put out by Canonical. "Virtualization is the key driver of data center restructuring at present, and Ubuntu's popularity with developers makes it an excellent choice for the next generation of virtualized environments. We have worked with VMware to deliver a version of Ubuntu that complements its exceptional virtualization capabilities, providing a solution for the ISVs building virtual appliances and for the enterprises planning to deploy them."

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